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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

V 



THE NEWER RELIGIOUS THINKING. 



The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit^ 

and are life. 

I came that they may have life, and may have it 

abundantly. 

The Lord Jesus. 



THE NEWER 



RELIGIOUS THINKING, 



BY 



DAVID NELSON BEACH. 



BOSTON: 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 

1893. 



H- 



;y/ 




<; 



Copyright, 1893, 
By David Nelson Beach. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



TO THE MEMORY 

OF 

PRESTON SHELDON, M.D. 

1854-1891. 



^ Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his 7nusic out." 



Old things are passed away. 
All things a?'e become new. 
All things are of God. 

Saint Paul. 



PREFACE. 



T^HE newer religious thinking here spoken 
of is not mine, nor any other man's, nor 
that of any institution, or school, or division 
of Christendom. It is a world movement. 
It is the lineal descendant of world move- 
ments older than Abraham. I have not 
attempted to define it except in the most 
general way, nor to compass it, but only to 
speak sympathetically and suggestively of it. 

I have not spoken technically, but in plain 
language. This is not a monograph. It 
is not specialist work. It is a talk about 
matters in everybody's thought. If I should 
characterize it at all, I should call it an inter- 
pretation, a trying to put new things and 
feared things — "they feared as they entered 
into the cloud " — in their simple and divine 
light. 



8 Preface. 

Such touching evidences of its oral help- 
fulness have reached me that I commit it 
to type. In so far as God's mind is in it, 
may it reach men's minds. For there is sore 
need of light. And there is need that the 
light have in it warmth and vision. If even 
a little of this is here, may it gladden eyes 
and stir hearts. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
April 29, 1893. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I. This Thinking Characterized 13 

II. Its Hunger after God 39 

III. Its Passion for Men 71 

IV. Its Thought of Nature, History, Life . loi 
V. Its Idea of the Bible 131 

VI. Christ its Centre 161 



APPENDICES. 

A. One Type of Nature Teaching . . . . 189 

B. Omitted Part of Discourse VI 199 

C. Some Plain Questioning 213 

List of Principal Notes 229 



God is love. 

In him is no darkness at all. 

It doth not yet appear what we shall be. 

We shall be like hhn. 

Saint John. 



THIS THINKING CHARACTERIZED. 



SYNOPSIS. 

Men are under a divine impulse. — It is from without, and 
yet from within. — This is what religion is. — Being thus life, 
it is ever renewing itself. — There always has been a newer 
religious thinking: In the Old Testament; In the New; 
Throughout the Christian ages ; Now (examples). — This 
implies no instability in the facts of religion, but only an 
ever-enlarging apprehension of them. — The latter is ground 
for unspeakable joy. — Interesting fields of study opened by 
this fact. — What business have we to go heresy-hunting ? — 
Certain indications of newer religious thinking at the present 
time: (i) Among men of unfaith ; (2) Among " Unevan- 
gelicals;" (3) In the Church of Rome; (4) Among " Evan- 
gehcals." — Certain characteristics of this thinking : (i) Its 
scientific temper; (2) Its practical bent; (3) Its purpose to 
include in its concept the entire religious impulse of the 
world; (4) Its obedience unto the heavenly vision. — Some- 
thing of eternity already shines in its face. 



THE 



NEWER RELIGIOUS THINKING. 



I. 

THIS THINKING CHARACTERIZED.^ 

Wherefore, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedie7it unto 
the heavenly vision. — Acts xxvi. 19. 

A DIVINE compulsion is here acknowl- 
"^^ edged. It becomes the law of a great, 
aspiring, epoch-affecting life. And the com- 
pulsion, the law, are of the sort which alone 
can be most potent over human life. They 
spring from vision, from an illumination of 
the inner nature. They are thus a part of 
the man. They are from without him, and 
yet from within him. They demand great 

1 Preached at Prospect Street Church, Cambridge, Mas- 
sachusetts, Sunday night, October 30, 1892. Somewhat 
amended here, but the spoken fo7'm retained. So of the 
later discourses. 



14 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

thoughts, feelings, revisions, renovations. 
Slowly, perhaps reluctantly, they command 
his assent. But being of him as well as 
from beyond him, they move and transform 
him. They are life. In the obeying of 
them there is life. The living spirit cannot 
be disobedient to them. 

This is what religion is. It is a some- 
thing from outside, and 3^et from inside. It 
is the life of a man, of men, of peoples, of 
epochs ; a part of them, and yet not of them 
so much as a reciprocity between them and 
their correlative in the nature of things, in 
the heart of the world, — in, for short, God. 
Being thus life, it is always renewing itself. 
It is ever young. There is always a newer 
reliofious thinkino^. 

There always has been such thinking in 
the past. Noah is farther on than Enoch ; 
Israel than Abraham ; the Moses of Deu- 
teronomy than the Moses of .Exodus ; Sam- 
uel than Joshua; David than Samuel, with 
that great discovery of his, " Thou desirest 
not sacrifice," and with that new face on 
nature, life, and religion, which ever in him 



This Thinking Characterized, 1 5 

appears. Isaiah is farther on, too, than 
EHjah ; and the late Isaiah than the earlier. 
The Christ of the Peraean ministry is an ad- 
vance over the Christ of the Galilean min- 
istry.^ Saint Peter at Caesarea, ten years after 
Pentecost, confesses that God has made clear 
to him a truth until then unperceived, — a 
truth around the question of the correctness 
of which the apostolic history thenceforth 
turns. The Saint Paul of First and Second 
Timothy is farther on, not only by a decade, 
but in his intellectual outlook, than the 

1 Whether or not the Evangelists indicate an advance in 
the thinking of the Saviour during his public ministry, cor- 
responding with his advance in method, is a question of 
interpretation ; and since their testimony is indirect, the 
interpretation will be colored by one's insight and concep- 
tion of developing character. It will also be colored, per- 
haps, by one's view of the person of Christ. My own view 
of his person is very high. Nevertheless, as his method ad- 
vanced, so, it seems to me, did his mental outlook. Neither 
am I able to see why its earlier advance (Luke ii. 52) should 
have been stayed when he reached the period of intense 
activity which would most have furthered such advance. 
And since there is no finer test of character than its behav- 
ior under access of fresh light, particularly when one is 
amidst life, I should be sorry to think of the Saviour as not 
knowing the fellowship with us of such character- testing. 
" It behoved him in all things to be made like unto his 
brethren " (Heb. ii. 17). 



1 6 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

Saint Paul of First and Second Corinthians. 
The Saint John of the Epistles sweeps a wider 
horizon than the Saint John at the Beautiful 
Gate of the Temple. On the open vision 
of the Greek Fathers succeeds the dogmatic 
rigidity of the Latin Fathers. Anselm treads 
broader fields than Gregory the Great. 
Luther, Zwingle, Calvin, exploit new fields, 
and dissentiently. Jonathan Edwards leads a 
new movement in the religious thought of 
New England, as well as that revival of its re- 
ligious life known as the " Great Awakening." 
The history, in short, of the Old Testament 
and of the New, that which gave signifi- 
cance and permanence to the writings there 
gathered, is progress, clearer and yet clearer 
apprehensions of truth. The history, too, of 
the Christian Church, as Professor Allen, of 
our city, has so admirably outlined in his book, 
" The Continuity of Christian Thought," is 
a history of the unfolding of Christian ideas. 
As I said, there always has been a newer 
religious thinking. Those ages which seem 
to have been motionless, and their thought 
dormant, were moving. There was many a 



This Thinking Characterized. 17 

morning star of the Reformation in the 
Middle-Age night. 

And as there always has been a newer re- 
ligious thinking, so there is to-day. A book 
has been shown me, which belonged to the 
late Rev. Asa Bullard. It is marked, " To 
be preserved, as it is my only copy." It is 
without titlepage. It is Horace Bushnell's 
" Christian Nurture." It never got far 
enough in the hands of the Massachusetts 
Sabbath School Society, of which Mr. Bullard 
was the executive, — now our Congrega- 
tional Sunday School and Publishing So- 
ciety, — to have a titlepage or an imprint. 
Why 1 Because certain men who saw its 
advance sheets pronounced it heresy, and 
raised such an alarm about it that it was 
suppressed. That book, issued by other 
publishers, is now a classic. Nobody is 
afraid of it. Mr. Bullard rejoiced in it, as, 
for aught I know, he did from the start.-^ 

1 Mr. Bullard died April 5, 1888, aged eighty-four years 
and ten days. He had been a member of Prospect Street 
Church since 1857. A window to his memory was put into 
the church at Easter, 1892. Its subject is, " Christ Bless- 
ing Little Children," after Hofmann. It is inscribed: "In 

2 



1 8 The Newer , Religious Thinking, 

When Professor Park was transferred from 
the chair of Homiletics to that of Theology 
at Andover, he was considered by man}^ a 
very dangerous man. Controversy regarding 
his teachings waxed hot. Pamphlets, reviews, 
newspapers, assailed him. Now he is re- 
garded as a bulwark of orthodoxy. When 
Prof. Nathaniel W. Taylor was teaching at 
New Haven, sixty years ago, matters now 
of commonest acceptance, Connecticut was 
convulsed to its centre with religious alarm 
against him, and the Seminary at East Wind- 
sor, now Hartford Seminary, was established 
to save the faith from his ravages. An elderly 
Englishman has recently contributed to one 
of our reviews, from personal recollection, 
the story of three religious panics in Great 
Britain, of a similar type, about matters 
that have ceased to give men anxiety. But 
let me summon you yourselves as witnesses. 

Loving Memory of the Children's Minister, Rev. Asa Bul- 
lard: Born, 1804; Died, 1888: From Prospect Street Church- 
and Sabbath School." Mr. Bullard did not agree in all 
respects theologically either with Dr. Bushnell or with the 
writer. The allusion here is only to his attitude toward Dr. 
Bushnell's book on the Christian upbringing of children. 



This Thinking Characterized, 19 

Probably all of you whose lives have cov- 
ered as many as twenty-five or thirty years 
have, consciously or unconsciously, some- 
what changed your thought on religious 
matters. If you have not, I condole with 
you. Twenty-five or thirty years in such a 
world as this ought somewhat to modify the 
ablest thinking even on religious subjects. 

Now what does this mean ? Does it im- 
ply that the facts at the basis of religion are 
not trustworthy 1 Does it insinuate that 
everything in religion is relative, and a mere 
matter of point of view ? Not at all. Such 
inferences were as absurd as to have inferred, 
when men were gradually accepting the 
Copernican astronomy, or modern geology, 
that sun and stars and earth were not trust- 
worthy, and were only relative, and matters of 
point of view. Sun, stars, earth, in common 
with the facts at the basis of religion, change 
not. But man's measure of them, grasp of 
them, knowledge of them, and impressible- 
ness by- them, change with the growing mind 
and heart of man. 

So far is such a state of things as I have 



20 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

been describing from being ground for 
alarm, that it is ground, the rather, for 
devout and unspeakable joy. As Kepler 
cried out, on discovering the clew to the 
computation of the orbits of the heavenly 
bodies, " I think God's thoughts after him ! " 
so does Saint Paul speak of the mystery hid 
through the ages, but now made known, and 
affirm that the chiefest of the apostles only 
sees as yet " in a mirror, darkly," but shall 
see " face to face." Every man, by reason 
of such a state of the case, becomes a discov- 
erer of truths divine, and a medium through 
whom others may receive the knowledge of 
such truths ; and the way is thus left open 
for an infinite progress in knowing, appre- 
ciating, and using the facts of religion. Any 
other state of the case would make future 
history a blank, and eternity a horror. For 
the world to go on, with progress in the ap- 
prehension of religious truth at an end, — 
seeing that religious truth is the deepest, the 
sweetest, the most transforming, — and for 
men, out of this world's toil, sweat, travail, 
weariness, and defeat, to be hurried on into 



This Thinking Characterized, 2 1 

an eternity in which our earth thoughts and 
earth measures of God were a finality, would 
be a fate of history and of humanity too fear- 
ful to contemplate. But such is not the fate, 
as these phenomena, from the earliest He- 
brew history until this hour, abundantly and 
gloriously prove. 

It would be interesting to make even a 
cursory study of the progress of religious 
thought in the Old Testament ; of the 
same progress during the perhaps four 
centuries between Malachi and Christ ; 
and of the same in the New Testament. 
This is a distinctively modern study, and 
is yet in its infancy. Toward it the new 
chairs of Biblical Theology, in various in- 
stitutions, are contributing. With it, for 
comprehensiveness and balance, the study 
of other, and especially of contemporaneous 
religions, needs to go, — " comparative re- 
ligions," as that study is often called. The 
same sort of study, similarly paralleled, for 
the Christian ages, would also be of great 
interest. 

Fresher, because more recent, accessible, 



22 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

and in touch with current thinking, would 
be a study of this progress during the 
present century, and particularly in Great 
Britain ; because the study of that portion of 
it would include a relatively compact terri- 
tory, history, and group of men. For this 
last, as I referred to Professor Allen's " Con- 
tinuity of Christian Thought," in reference to 
the Christian ages, let me commend TuUoch's 
" Movements of Religious Thought in Brit- 
ain during the Nineteenth Century." In 
these movements, the poets, of some of 
whom we have been thinking together re- 
cently, have had a far greater hand than 
Professor Tulloch indicates, — he having in 
that book treated only of distinctively reli- 
gious writers. Tennyson's " In Memoriam," 
for example, marks a great " divide " and 
new upland in our century's outlook toward 
immortality. That service to human think- 
ing would have been, of itself, an immeas- 
urable gift to the world, had the Laureate 
written nothing else. 

We cannot, however, go into these matters 
now. But there is a practical question we 



This Thinking Characterized. 23 

can go into. The question is this : What 
business have we to mutiny against this law 
of our being, the law of the Bible, the law of 
religious history, the law which hinders the 
future from being a blank and eternity a 
horror, and go heresy-hunting ? They stoned 
heretics in the Old Testament. They cut 
off their heads and crucified them in the 
New. They invented the horrors of the In- 
quisition for them in the sixteenth century. 
We build the sepulchres of those heretics. 
We are always quoting them and praising 
them. We know that they discovered truth 
for us, and made the world better for us. 
Why, then, do we start off to be the ruin of 
heretics now } Why do we hold the clothes 
of them that stone them } Have we not a 
measure of common-sense ? Do we care to 
repeat the folly of trying to suppress the 
Horace Bushnells, the Nathaniel W. Taylors, 
the Professor Parks, of nowadays? Surely 
we shall be laughed at some day for doing 
this. ^ Perhaps we shall live long enough to 
laugh at ourselves. Mr. Bullard, with his 
sense of humor, must have edged off into a 



24 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

smile and then into a laugh, when he saw 
that poor thin little Bushnell book, without 
any titlepage or imprint, and with its " To be 
preserved, as it is my only copy." There 
were soon copies enough. 

Turning, however, from these reflections, 
let us notice, first, certain indications, and 
then certain characteristics, of the newer re- 
hgious thinking at the present time. 

I. Certain indications. 

1. And, to begin with, even unbelief, in 
its truer, more typical phases, is in a hopeful 
state of newness and progress. It does not 
scoff; it is sorry not to believe. Its quarrel 
is with extreme partisans of faith, not with 
those humble, teachable souls who live their 
faith. Witness divisions xxxi., xxxii., and 
XXXIII., of " In Memoriam " as an expression, 
indeed from a somewhat different point of 
view, of this new attitude. 

2. Those Christians, moreover, commonly 
termed " unevangelical " are likewise in a 
certain refreshing newness and progress of 
thought. Those of them often called " radi- 
cals," while moving away from some of the 



This Thinking Characterized, • 25 

simpler facts of religion, are in many in- 
stances taking the most commendable steps 
toward the practical aspects of the religious 
life ; while the so-called " moderates " are 
adopting thoughts and methods which bring 
them nearer to the so-called " evangelical " 
religionists. They hunger for a warmer, 
more pronounced religious experience; for 
meetings for prayer ; for mission work ; for 
such work even among the heathen ; and 
for some ground of unity which may bring 
them into closer touch with the Church 
universal. 

This might be abundantly illustrated were 
there time. The odium theologicum, if not 
passed, is passing. And as a liberal spirit 
among so-called " Evangelicals " is often the 
cause of much reproach to its possessors, so 
among the classes already referred to, those 
who are moving in this newness and prog- 
ress are often maligned for doing so. The 
superintendent of the non-sectarian East 
End Christian Union, of our city, tells of 
meeting a Trinitarian who did not want to 
contribute toward it because it was too lib- 



26 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

eral, and then a Unitarian who found fault 
with it because it w^as too orthodox. And 
with the thought underlying the superin- 
tendent's plain rejoinder, " I told both of 
them that I had no use for such men," the 
truer spirits of both wdngs will tend more 
and more to agree. 

3. Think, again, how^ in the Church of 
Rome there are also the progressives ; how 
the present Pope is in this respect an ad- 
vance on the last ; how men like the revered 
pastor of one of our Cambridge Catholic 
churches, while no less Catholics, are push- 
ing forward — often at the expense of that 
obloquy from their associates which the 
prophets and apostles of progress have gen- 
erally to encounter — into a practical fellow- 
ship with religious men outside their ancient 
communion. 

4. Once more, in the religious bodies 
nearer ourselves than any of these, reflect, 
for example, on the coming of the Episco- 
pal Church toward Phillips Brooks ; on the 
tightening fellowship of the Presbyterian 
Church, which revolts from schism in the 



This Thinking Characterized. 27 

case of Union Seminary and of Professor 
Briggs, whom such organs of conservatism 
as the " New York Observer " have long 
been scourging outrageously ; and on the 
disposition of our own denomination to in- 
clude rather than to expel men, churches, 
and institutions of learning, on which a sec- 
tion of the religious press has waged war for 
years.^ 

In the light of facts like these, it may be 
unhesitatingly affirmed that there is a greater 
unity amidst diversity, a greater respect for 
differences of opinion, a greater bringing of 
all questions to the test of life and of spirit, 
and a larger, truer thinking about God, and 

1 On the primary movement now going on in human nature 
toward inclusiveness and .soHdarity, see Professor Tucker's 
memorable Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, June 30, 
1892. These sentences in it bear on that portion of the sub- 
ject here alluded to : — 

" Questions are arising in our time, and passing into heat- 
ed discussion, of the most fundamental and vital kind, which 
in other times would have split the most compact body, 
but thus far they have not divided a single communion. The 
one ecclesiastical sin of our age is schism. Of that alone 
we are intolerant" (pp. 18, 19). 

The Oration is entitled, " The New Movement in Human- 
ity from Liberty to Unity." Houghton, Mifflin, and Com- 
pany, Boston. 1892. 



28 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

life, and truth, to-day, among religious people 
the likest to ourselves, than there has ever 
been before ; and that we, in this respect, 
are, as I have intimated, wittingly or un- 
wittingly, in the current of a great world- 
movement in similar directions, embracing 
" Unevangelicals " as well as "Evangelicals," 
Catholics as well as Protestants, and the 
truer types of unbelievers as well as believers. 
Thus is the prayer, " Thy kingdom come," 
getting its answer, — • slowly, with many a re- 
verse, with sore travail still, but surely. He 
whose right it is already reigns, and is mar- 
shalling events, movements, men, opinions, 
into compacter, truer lines of tendency, ex- 
pectation, and promise ; all of which shall 
eventuate according to that " heavenly 
vision" which, whether we will or not, we 
cannot choose but obey, and the ending 
whereof the wisest and the most far-sighted 
only sees as " in a mirror, darkly." 

II. Next, and in conclusion, let us try to 
fix in our minds certain characteristics of 
the newer religious thinking of our time. 

I. One of them is its scientific temper. 



This Thinking Characterized. 29 

The thinking of which I speak is not 
going on in this century of the vastest ex- 
pansion of the boundaries of knowledge 
that the world has ever known without 
being affected at once by the knowledge, 
and by those processes of induction and of 
deduction by which the knowledge has come. 
It grows tired of theories. It wants facts. 
After these it is groping everywhere, — in 
the world of nature, in the field of archaeol- 
ogy, in that mighty research for a true 
account of the origin of the human species, 
often caricatured as a trying to prove one's 
descent from apes, but a far deeper and 
wider reaching investigation than the cari- 
caturists dream ; in heredity, too, in animal 
psychology, in sociology, in the history of 
opinions, and in those seers, the prophets, 
psalmists, and poets of all time. 

It wants the truth, nothing but the truth, 
and will have it at all hazards ; and is un- 
alterably purposed to count nothing finally 
settled, until it matches in with God's whole 
book of nature as well as of grace, and of 
the human heart as well as of metaphysics. 



30 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

And since there is no schism in the truth, 
but truth agrees with itself, verifies itself, 
and is a unity, we ought to be devoutly 
thankful that such a purpose marks the 
newer religious thinking. 

2. Another characteristic of this thinking 
is its practical bent. 

" What can religion do for a man ? " it 
seems forever to be asking. That which, 
more than anything else, has sickened it of 
over-confidence in certain systematic ways 
of looking at truth is the miserable fruit 
of such systems. It does not want a reli- 
gion professing to follow the forgiving Jesus, 
if that religion does not make men forgiv- 
ing. It does not want a religion of love 
which does not make men loving. It does 
not want a religion which teaches that all 
men are brothers, if it produces the class 
distinctions, the outrageous disparities be- 
tween wealth and poverty, and that luxuri- 
ous selfishness so common, hardly less in 
the Church than out of it, in our time. 

Furthermore, when it accepts religion, 
albeit never so devotedly, it is not content 



This Thinking Characterized. 31 

with prayers, sacraments, sound doctrine, 
and religious routine. In these it believes. 
But it wants something adequate to show 
for them in deeds. It is willing to invest 
heavily in religion, but demands dividends 
in bettered lives, ennobled communities, and 
truer political, economic, intellectual, and so- 
cial conditions. 

3. Yet another characteristic of the newer 
religious thinking is its purpose to include 
in its concept the entire religious impulse of 
the world. 

When " they therefore that were scattered 
abroad upon the tribulation that arose about 
Stephen travelled " far, " speaking the word 
to none save only to Jews," until an almost 
accidental experiment taught them better, 
they did what religion has characteristi- 
cally done until our time. That God was 
with and in the religious life of the Egyptians, 
Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, etc., as well as 
with and in the religious life of the Hebrews, 
has be.en little recognized until recently. But 
he was. No race, no people, no history, has 
a monopoly of religion. Religion is a great 



32 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

fact. It is a part of the race of man. It is 
the correlation of man and what is above 
and beyond him. 

The newer religious thinking recognizes 
this comprehensiveness. It is trying to un- 
derstand all religions. It hopes, through the 
religions and religious impulses of all peo- 
ples, to bring in the simpler, clearer, and 
final religion. Hence the men of faith are 
reaching out and striking hands with the 
men who, until recently, would have been 
called the men not of faith, to help them and 
to receive help. To illustrate what I mean : 
Almost no man ever helped me more in 
spiritual things — I say, please note, " helped 
me," not I him — than a friend of mine, now 
passed on into the infinite light, who was to 
such an extent an agnostic that, for a long 
time, he could not so much as pray. But 
his life was a faith, a prayer, a holiness, such 
that he was a new manifestation of God to 
my life, and to the lives of all who knew 
him.^ In such a sense as this, the men of 
faith are striking hands with men hitherto 

1 It is to his memory that this book is inscribed. 



This Thinking Characterized, 33 

generally counted not of faith, for mutual 
help. 

Similarly the newer religious thinking 
despairs not that the different divisions of 
Christendom, heretofore seemingly hope- 
lessly estranged, and all theistic religions, 
and indeed all religions, have contributions 
to make toward, and in some sense a place 
to take in, the ampler and more adequate 
religious life that is to be. This is the 
same thing as to say, not only that the 
newer religious thinking has a scientific 
temper, but that it has at length come 
to recognize religion in its every form as 
a great, scientific, and mightily instructive 
fact. Please observe that, in making this 
statement, I have no time to define and 
clarify it. Because I do not do so, it may 
be that I shall be misunderstood. But when 
" men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, 
and nation " are represented as contributing 
to the apocalyptic glory, it is impossible for 
me to believe that the religions, and religi- 
ous capacities, receptivities, and aptitudes of 
" every tribe, and tongue, and people, and 

3 



34 The Newer Religious Thinkin 



^— ' ^£'' 



nation " are not also taken into the account, 
and given their range and use. " God," we 
read, "is no respecter of persons;" and I 
beg leave to doubt if, any more, he is a 
respecter of religions. 

4. Finally, while the newer religious 
thinking is scientific in temper, practical in 
bent, and is enlarging its concept of religion, 
let no man say, or even imagine, that this 
thinking is other than inspired by, and 
obedient unto, a " heavenly vision," which 
ever hovers in its foreground, and beckons 
it on. 

The boundaries of its belief may be les- 
sened, for it doubts much ; but the depths 
and heights of that belief are infinite. Out 
on a simple, real, honest confidence it ven- 
tures, like Abraham scarce knowing whither 
it goes, but sure that it must leave not only 
Ur of the Chaldees, but Haran, and come 
into a place which it is after to receive for 
an inheritance. 

God, for it, is no longer in a creed, how- 
ever true the creed may be ; nor in any 
book, however priceless; nor in any or- 



This Thinking Characterized. 35 

ganization, however venerable and sacred ; 
nor in any form or observance, however 
helpful in itself; nor here, nor there, nor 
accessible in thus and such a manner; but 
God is with the man, — in him, about him, 
beyond him, his Father, Helper, Friend, and 
All-sufficiency. 

And he himself is in God's universe, nor 
ever can get out of it ; so that even mys- 
terious heaven grows simple, being God's ; 
and he does not crave so much to be in 
heaven, even, as to be in such a mind as 
God is in, and as to be helping some other 
God's-child, his brother, though he were 
fathoming hell to find him. 

And for him fear is done; for has not 
perfect love cast it out } And hope is ever 
fresh ; for can he ever wholly find out God, 
or sound God's love's-depth ? And as for 
motive, of the want or badness whereof so 
many complain, that is no longer his solici- 
tude ; for has not the same marched on 
him, seized him, and possessed itself of him 
forever, even the movement of none other 
than the living God motive henceforth in 



36 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

him ? True, he expects nothing other than 
to descend again and again into the depths, 
— cast down many a time, defeated, spent; 
but went there not One before him thither ? 
Shall he not follow so kingly a Forerunner? 
And has not all this a purpose ? 

But, truth to tell, he is reluctant so much 
as to think of himself. Self, in fact, is get- 
ting out of him. Truth, reality, God, are 
getting in. Herein, too, he is " not diso- 
bedient unto the heavenly vision," and there- 
fore wots not that that vision is even now 
transfiguring him, and that something of 
eternity already shines in his face. 



ITS HUNGER AFTER GOD. 



SYNOPSIS. 

Hunger after God the propulsion of newer religious think- 
ing. — Jacob and Moses illustrate this. — Why it is neces- 
sarily so. — The receivers and revel ators of larger religious 
truth have become such by reason of their hunger for it (exam- 
ples). — Sketch of the upgrowth of the newer religious think- 
ing of our time. — The newer literature contained it, in 
principle, but religious thinkers were specially its channel. 
— Coleridge and Bushnell ; their wide influence. — The 
Tractarians: — Necessarily, over against the two tendencies 
represented by the foregoing, came Arnold, Robertson, 
Maurice, Kingsley, etc. — Their application of religion to 
life. — The Germanic contribution ; contrast between it and 
the Anglo-Saxon. — The thinking of this decade an advance 
on that outlined above, by reason of ampler data through 
long inductive work. — America, until recently, provincial 
in this matter. — The sketch suggests how hunger after God 
has impelled the movement. — Personal testimony. — This 
hunger necessitates image-breaking in theology. — Mr. 
Beecher's remarks in connection with his " Background of 
Mystery." — Some idols needing overthrow : (i) The machine 
thought of God ; there is a Biblical pantheism ; (2) Exag- 
geration of the idea of God as ruler ; God not mainly that ; 
(3) Undue insistence on the philosophy of the Trinity ; how 
far that doctrine may rightly go ; (4) God in Christ as 
mainly governmental or forensic; the facts can never be 
included under this category ; Christ a vital, living, present 
Saviour. — Other idols suggested. -;- The Good Tidings 
unspeakably hurt by such misrepresentations of God. — The 
Church, the clergy, the laity, in fact all true souls, have 
herein a heavy responsibility laid on them. 



II. 

ITS HUNGER AFTER GOD.i 

And yacob asked him^ and said, Tell me, I pray thee, 
thy name. — Genesis xxxii. 29. 

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto 
the children of Israel, and shall say unto thein, The 
God of your fathers hath se?it me unto you ; and they 
shall say to me. What is his najne ? what shall I 
say unto the7n ? — Exodus iii. 13. 

And he said, Show me, I pray thee, thy glory, — Exodus 
xxxiii. 18. 



T 



HE newer religious thinking of the 
present proves its kinship to the newer 
religious thinking of all time in finding its 
propulsion in a profound hunger after God. 

Jacob, who wished to know the name of 
his mysterious visitor, and Moses, who put 
the same question, and desired to behold 
God's glory, epitomize the natural history 
of all truly unfolding religious thought. 
Here is the man ; somewhere, in him, be- 

1 Prospect Street, Sunday night, November 6, 1892. 



40 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

yond him, is infinite reality, — in one word, 
God. Religion is that verity, partly concep- 
tual, partly factual, which correlates the two. 
And because life is life, because the living 
man thinks, feels, and grows, his thought of 
this verity, his conception of religion, grows. 
But the object of his conception, namely, 
religion, being a correlation, being a some- 
thing from within him as well as from be- 
yond him, he is not passive in his growing 
religious thought. He is active ; he thinks ; 
he feels. He strives to clarify his thinking 
and feeling; he hungers after knowledge 
of the infinite ; he yearns toward God. 
*' Tell me, I pray thee, thy name," he cries ; 
" Show me, I pray thee, thy glory." And 
the hunger, the cry, the attitude of interest 
and inquiry before that bush, burning but 
not consumed, which the universe is, and the 
struggle, as of one wrestling in the night, 
with the mysterious problems of life and of 
destiny, predispose a man to receive impres- 
sions, light, and new religious life. " He 
that seeketh, findeth." 

It is not, therefore, by accident or partial- 



Its Hunger after God. 41 

ity that the wrestling Jacobs, and the inquir- 
ing and seeking men like Moses, receive, 
each in his fashion, new thoughts, ideals, 
and principles in the range of religion. 
Indeed, it might be summarily said, without 
fear of successful contradiction, that the 
receivers and revelators of larger truth, par- 
ticularly in the realm of religion, — whether 
they have been such receivers and revelators 
publicly or privately, in a w^idely recognized 
manner or not, or within the bounds of one 
form of religion or of another, — have become 
the channels for receiving and revealing such 
larger truth, through their own hunger for 
it, their own impressibleness by it, and their 
own receptivity and responsiveness to it. 

Thus all the newer religious thinking, 
worthy the name, whether in the past or in 
the present, has had its spring in hunger 
after God. Jacob and Moses, Samuel and 
David, Elijah and Isaiah, Saint Paul and 
Saint John, Origen and Augustine, Gregory 
the Great and Anselm, Luther and Knox, 
John Bunyan and Jonathan Edwards, John 
Wesley and John Henry Newman, Maurice 



42 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

and Bushnell, Phillips Brooks and Father 
Hall, — these, in common with the lowliest 
waiters on truth divine, have received and 
given out the divine impulse, as hungering 
for it, seeking it, filled with it, transformed by 
it, and as thereby the mediums through which 
it has passed into the possession of mankind. 
What a lesson is there not for us here, to be 
open, receptive, hungering toward God, and, 
as freely receiving, so to be freely giving ! 
For of this trul}^ sacramental privilege, as of 
that other spoken of by Lowell, it remains 
true that — 

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, 
In whatso we share with another's need ; 
Not what we give, but what we share, — 
For the gift without the giver is bare." 

But, to be more specific : — 

I. Let us, in the first place, bring rapidly 
before our minds a little of the way in which 
this century's newer religious thinking has 
come down to us ; and let us be asking our- 
selves meanwhile whether, looked at as re- 
gards the men identified with it, this thinking 
is not akin, as I observed at the outset, to the 



Its Hunger after God. 43 

newer religious thinking of all time, in find- 
ing its propulsion in a profound hunger after 
God. 

This thinking, with its corresponding 
hunger, then, let us not forget, was already 
abroad, in less definite manifestation, in 
the newer literature which ushered in this 
century, — in Burns, for example, and Cole- 
ridge, and Wordsworth, yes, even in Shelley. 
It was caught up and developed in our epoch- 
marking poets, in Tennyson, in Lowell, in 
Browning. 

But in men approaching with an especially 
religious wistfulness the burning bush of the 
universe, the Peniel of human existence, it 
most strongly appeared. Coleridge, now 
thought of as religious thinker rather than 
as poet, made a way for it in England ; 
Bushnell, in America.-^ It is difiicult for us 
of the immediate present to understand how 

1 No study of the history of this subject, in America, 
should omit the relation to it of Dr. Channing, Theodore 
Parker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor, on both sides of 
the Atlantic, should the impulse toward earnestness, reality, 
and moral enthusiasm which was afforded by Thomas Car- 
lyle be overlooked. 



44 l^he Newer Religious Thinking, 

vast was the influence which Coleridge ex- 
erted on the religious thinkers of the genera- 
tion now aging and aged on both sides the 
Atlantic. One of that generation, a leader 
of that branch of the Christian Church of 
which he was a clergyman, and now long 
passed on into eternal light, told me, in the 
first year of my ministry, that Coleridge was 
as real a personality to him as if he had been 
his companion and intimate friend. He had 
entered as living power into that man's life. 
Bushnell had a like influence. He was read 
abroad with hardly less interest than in 
America. He was particularly powerful 
in the pulpit. His prayers were as if 
he stood in the presence-chamber, not only 
of infinite majesty, but of infinite truth and 
clearness of vision and power of illumina- 
tion. In advanced age, in the chapel of 
Yale College, preaching as I never heard 
other mortal preach, he first gave me — in 
crude beginnings — some grasp on things 
eternal. Both men were John the Baptists, 
forerunners of our new temper in religion. 
They were dwelling ever on the spirit and 



Its Httnger after God. 45 

meaning of nature, of events, of mind, and 
of life. They were tracing the analogies of 
things natural and things spiritual. The 
title of one of Bushnell's books, " Nature and 
the Supernatural," typifies both men. 

But between the men of Coleridge's tem- 
per and the literal religionists of England, 
there sprang antagonisms ; and amidst the 
uncertainties and contentions consequent 
thereupon, and due also to other causes 
which were likewise at work, there started a 
type of newer thinking which concentrated 
attention on institutional Christianity, on the 
Church, on its traditions, usages, and au- 
thority. This was the Tractarian movement. 
Some men in it, like Newman, went to 
Rome ; some, like Pusey, into the high- 
church side of Protestantism. Mightily 
stimulating to thought, study, and the per- 
sonal religious life, were these men. They, 
too, were helpful builders of the spiritual 
temple. 

In ^uch a state of affairs, because men in 
religion could neither be mainly idealists, as 
Coleridge was, nor mainly Churchmen as the 



46 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

Tractarians were, but must be in life, and 
hold a living faith that could shape England's 
politics and help England's poor, that could 
recover a foothold of trust again for men 
far gone toward unbelief, and could satisfy 
minds as penetrating as Tennyson's and 
Browning's, — there began to come forward 
men hard to classify, so new, fresh, strong, 
were their utterances and their thoughts : 
Thomas Arnold, Frederick W. Robertson, 
Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kings- 
ley, and many others of a like temper on 
both sides of the Atlantic, though few in- 
deed comparable to these. 

It was the magnificent service of such men 
that they recovered for religion its hold on 
life : Arnold, for example, on the men of 
Rugby and of the universities ; Robertson 
on such a populous and frivolous watering- 
place as Brighton ; Maurice on the students 
of Lincoln's Inn, and on the London work- 
ingmen ; and Kingsley on town and country 
living, on scientific pursuits, and on the burn- 
ing questions of a practical nature which 
were agitating England. It was their mag- 



Its Hunger after God. 47 

nificent service, likewise, to show that doubt 
may be the doorway of faith ; that reason 
has its place in religion, indeed that religion 
is the highest reason ; that, moreover, beyond 
formal reason there is a reason intuitional, 
of insight, of vision, and of the living 
" Word " of God in men's souls ; and above 
all, that Christianity is a present, living, and 
constructive force in society and in the life 
of individuals, in distinction from being a 
tradition, an observance, or a pious piece of 
partialism. 

Other lands, other faiths, and indeed, as I 
suggested in the last discourse, unfaiths, had 
their parts to contribute to the newer reli- 
gious thinking. On them I cannot dwell 
otherwise than to testify how greatly the 
Teutonic mind, in point of research, of sys- 
tematizing, and of insight, has stimulated 
scholarship, has accumulated intellectual 
material, and has moved philosophically 
toward the spirit and unity of all religions. 
To this mind, to the land and race of 
Luther, the newer religious thinking owes 
measureless obligations. Nevertheless, for 



48 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

religion in application, for it in its relations 
to the nation, to society, to home, and to 
the heart, — for, in short, religion in its more 
concrete aspects, — Germany has not in my 
judgment, done for the world that peculiar 
living service which has characterized in 
particular the constructive minds of Great 
Britain, and, to a less degree, of their kin 
this side the sea. 

We of this decade belong in a distinctly 
different stage of the newer religious think- 
ing from that to which Robertson, Maurice, 
and their group belonged. We have a vast 
accumulation of facts now well ascertained, 
which was not within the reach of those 
men, and which was, as it were, only divined 
by them from afar. We have in general a far 
richer archaeology than they ; in particular, 
a more adequate grasp of remote history, 
and of the processes at work in prehistoric 
times ; a wider acquaintance with religions 
and with race tendencies ; great gains in 
critical knowledsfe of how the Bible came 
to be, and of Hebrew history ; and, compre- 
hensively, an exacter science alike in regard 



Its Hunger after God, 49 

to the forces at work in nature, in society, 
and in human life. All these, with their 
inevitable modification and enrichment of a 
thinking much cruder then than now, have 
brought the men of the present to positions 
and tendencies in thought which were not 
to have been expected then. 

Indeed, when some sense of all this comes 
in on the mind like a flood, how can one 
repress a cry to God that we may not be 
dull and unwitting, but may understand 
our time, sympathize with it, appreciate its 
mighty meaning, get at least a little way 
into that meaning ourselves, and make it 
potent in ourselves and in all about us ? 
But on the spirit of those men, on their 
splendid courage, on their insight into spir- 
itual things, and on their unshaken resolve, 
come what might, that religion should lay 
hold on life, — on these elements in them 
we have not advanced, nor shall we in many 
a day. 

It ought further to be remarked that we 
in America, having been engaged in build- 
ing up this great country of ours, in fighting 

4 



50 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

our war through, in grappling with the ques- 
tions thence issuing, and withal, by our tar- 
iffs, our trusts, our speculations, and our 
shrewdnesses, in getting money faster than 
any other nation, and in spending it faster, 
have until recently stood aside somewhat 
provincially from the great, hard, thorough 
religious thinking be3^ond the seas ; so that 
such gatherings as the general Congrega- 
tional Council in London in 1891, where 
religious leaders of the same communion in 
America meet those of England and the 
Continent, bring forcibly to mind the fact 
that, theologically, many of us need to set 
our watches considerably ahead in order to 
tell Greenwich time. 

Getting and spending money, if done in 
righteousness, and developing a great coun- 
try such as ours, are good. One ma}^, in- 
deed, be permitted the inquiry whether they 
are the highest good, — whether a people 
may not be too rich, and whether a country 
may not, like a spindling child, develop 
faster than is for its permanent advantage. 
Certain at any rate it is that our brethren 



Its Hu7iger after God, 5 1 

beyond the sea have surpassed us in the 
getting and practical expenditure of the 
riches of Godward and manward thinking, 
and in developing a country consisting, not 
of granite and of prairie loam, but of reason- 
ableness, righteousness, and truth. To them 
we may well turn with teachable minds, — 
not necessarily to agree with them in all 
respects, but to emulate their noble studies 
and lofty thoughts. 

In this rapid survey of the way along 
which the newer religious thinking of this 
century has travelled until it has reached 
us, I hope has appeared, at least impliedly, 
what I now affirm, that the persons, known 
or unknown, who have been most hospitable 
to it, and have most furthered it, have been 
moved, like Jacob or Moses, with great and 
earnest hungerings after God. His true, 
real, meaning-full name, his glory and him- 
self, have been the objects of their quest. 
Not longer the Holy Grail, but very God, 
has allured them on. 

No one who knew Arnold of Rugby, with 
whom religion was the heart of everything; 



5 2 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

or Maurice, whose very face, manner, and 
bearing became a holy benediction, often 
remarked upon as he walked the streets ; 
or Kingsley, for whom the whole world was, 
like his own Chester, God's wonderful cathe- 
dral, — no one, I say, who knew these men 
could well avoid likening them to typical 
men in Bible times. And as for Robertson, 
England has not seen, nor shall see, one 
hungering more for God. Such a tem- 
per, too, was in the Tractarian movement. 
Newman, as much as Robertson, sought 
God. A friend of mine who visited him 
toward the close of his life, could not give 
an account of the interview without con- 
veying the most vivid impression of his 
saintliness. Such a temper, differently man- 
ifesting itself, animated Wordsworth, Ten- 
nyson, Browning. The Germans, in their 
prodigious labors for a better religious think- 
ing, have, in their truer representatives, been 
devout too. So have our own people. So 
has many a man outside religious lines, and 
many a man seemingly outside of all faith. 
It is right, on such a point as this, that 



Its Hunger after God. 53 

I should bear my personal testimony. If 
you have ever seen In me any unselfishness, 
any love of men, any grasp of affairs, any 
public spirit, any courage of conviction, any 
anything that is true, then let me say to 
you that the mightiest incentive thereto 
which I have ever known has been that 
vision of God, more simply and as I believe 
more truly conceived of, which in an ever- 
increasing degree commands me. It was 
so in the long ago of which I just now 
spoke, when God, through Horace Bushnell, 
.awakened my soul. It was so seven years 
since, when, led as I believe of God, I 
unfolded to you my simpler conviction re- 
specting our Lord's work.^ It is so, if I 
know my own heart, as I speak to you in 
these discourses. And if I, who am so de- 
ficient, find God, more simply thought of, so 
much more to my life, and such a propul- 
sion to truer thinking, how much more may 
we suppose this to be true of the veritable 

^ The two sermons, with some notes and additional mat- 
ter, form the little book, "- Plain Words on Our Lord's 
Work." Cupples, Upham, and Company, Boston. 1886. 



54 T"^^ Newer Religious Thinking. 

leaders of religious thought, the holy proph- 
ets and seers of our time. 

II. If now I have succeeded in making 
evident, by way of narrative and from indi- 
vidual illustrations, the fact to which I have 
also felt constrained to bear my personal 
testimony, namely, that hunger after God 
actuates the newer religious thinking, let me 
point out, in the second place, and as com- 
pleting this discourse, some ways in which 
this hunger works practically. 

Dr. Lyman Abbott, in the sermon preached 
in Plymouth Church the Sunday morning 
after Mr. Beecher's death, made this state- 
ment : " When your pastor preached that 
famous sermon on the ' Background of Mys- 
tery,' which created so much excitement and 
produced so much criticism, I went to him 
with the proofs of it. It was to be published 
in ' The Christian Union,' and I said to him : 
' Mr. Beecher, this sermon ■ you must revise.' 
I think it was the only time I ever had. 
a controversy with Mr. Beecher and came 
out best, but he yielded that time. . . . And 
then I remember his turning to me, his great 



Its Hunger after God. 55 

form growing greater, and the great brow 
growing higher, and his great eyes flashing 
fire, as he said something like this : ' There 
are times, in preaching, when I have a con- 
ception of the greatness and the goodness 
and the mercy and the love of my God, and 
then see by the side of it the hideous idols 
that are put up in Christian temples and 
represented in Christian literature, that are 
maligning my God ; and I hate them, as the 
old Hebrew prophets hated the idols of old 
time, with an unutterable hatred ; and ' — 
then, with one of those sudden transitions, 
he dropped back and said — ' something 's 
got to give way.' " 

In this connection one remembers the zeal 
of the old image-breakers, say in Antwerp 
Cathedral in the time of William the Silent, 
or on many an occasion in the life of Israel. 
The image, or the idol, seemed such a trav- 
esty of God that the moral indignation almost 
passed bounds. But not all the idols are of 
wood, or of stone. Some of them are of the 
mind, — ideas, conceptions, doctrines. We 
worship sometimes the Bible more than 



56 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

the Holy Spirit, speaking within us as it 
spake to holy men of old. We worship 
sometimes our ideas of Christ's work more 
than we worship Christ. We worship some- 
times human names and human authority 
more than we worship the living God. 

Now the newer religious thinking, under- 
standing by the light of history when it was 
that more or less of these images were set 
up (even as Christ did when he said, "Moses 
for your hardness of heart suffered you to " 
do a certain thing, " but from the beginning 
it hath not been so"), hungers to such a de- 
gree after God, and to have God no longer 
obscured and misrepresented by these images, 
that, like the old image or idol breakers, 
those to whom the clearer vision has come 
cannot but do what in them lies to break the 
idols down. Their course looks, to those 
not understanding it, like sacrilege. It 
seems inexplicable. But in reality it is 
hunger after God manifesting itself in this 
form. 

May all such not feel " hate," except in 
Mr. Beecher's beneficent sense. May they 



Its Hunger after God, 57 

have, the rather, a loving and pitying spirit, 
although firm and thorouo^h in their work. 
And when it costs them much, as many a 
time it will, may they have the spirit of the 
Lord Jesus, who broke down idol after idol 
of Jewish prejudice, but wept over Jeru- 
salem, and prayed, " Father, forgive them," 
for those who avenged the broken idols by 
crucifying him. 

What, let us ask, then, are some of the 
idols which the newer religious thinking, in 
this its hunger after God, would fain throw 
down } 

I. One of them I may characterize as a 
machine or mechanical conception of God, — 
God as making the universe out of hand, like 
a machine ; God as dwelling apart from the 
universe, as the makers of a gigantic ocean 
steamship, having built it, turn it off to ply 
back and forth without them on the stormy 
deep ; and God as about to break up the 
universe, very much as if it were only so 
much junk. 

Now, that there are expressions in the 
Bible regarding his forming the universe, 



58 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

doing what he wishes with it, and destroying 
it, admits of no question. But from these it 
cannot follow that such is an adequate repre- 
sentation of his relation to the universe. 
There are other and different expressions, 
which represent him as in his works, as de- 
lighting in them, as clothing himself with 
them. But the former type of representa- 
tions, and the natural tendency of ages pre- 
ceding this to look at matters mechanically, 
have brought it about that the ordinary 
conception of the relation of God to the 
universe is of the inadequate type which I 
have described. 

This is a heavy reflection on God. It 
runs counter to our deepest instincts. It is 
contrary to reason that so vast, intricate, and 
mysterious a world, so athrill with thought 
and life, should be mechanical, a thing thrown 
off, a mere machine. It is contrary, also, to 
the teachings of science, which more and 
more are deepening the mystery of the uni- 
verse. It is opposed, moreover, to the ruling 
expressions in the Bible. Not so do the 
minds which appear in the opening chap- 



Its Hunger after God, 59 

ters of Genesis conceive of the world. His 
Spirit, as they suppose, broods it. He finds it 
very good. Men cannot get to the best of it, 
because they will not live truly enough, but 
God's angels can. Within it he himself 
walks in the cool of the day. So reverent 
of this earth are those far-off men ! Not so, 
either, does Saint Paul conceive of the world. 
" The invisible things of him since the crea- 
tion of the world are clearly seen, being per- 
ceived through the things that are made, 
even his everlasting power and divinity," 
exclaims the Apostle ; and he represents the 
universe as sympathetically in a groaning 
and travail with the world-long birth of 
mental and spiritual life. 

*' But," says some one, " a thought of the 
universe contrary in this respect to the tra- 
ditional one would issue in pantheism." 
Ah, my friend, you are at the usual tactics ; 
employing deduction from imperfect con- 
ceptions, instead of induction from the fullest 
possible data, and sounding an unwarrantable 
alarm. Let us not be frightened at a name. 
Pantheism, by itself, is inadequate enough; 



6o The Newer Religious Thinking. 

but there is a divine, yes a Biblical pantheism, 
— all things in God, by him, through him; 
all things standing together in him ; he in his 
world, not apart from it ; his world uttering 
him, expressing him, bodying him forth. 

No epoch since Hebrew and Greek poets 
sang, except that period which has suc- 
ceeded, though the least spiritual, in fasten- 
ing upon us a large part of our religious 
ideas, namely, the Middle Ages, could have 
had the Bible in hand, and propounded in 
this respect a view of the universe utterly 
repugnant to the spirit of the Bible. This 
mechanical thought of God in his relation 
to the world must go; the more spiritual 
thought of him as immanent, as pervading 
the world, and as of it, though more than it, 
must come. The world is sacred. Exist- 
ence is divine. There is nothing in which 
God is not. Ah ! the beauty, the glory, the 
meaning, the comfort herefrom ! How ma- 
chine-like, with the lathe-marks still showing, 
is the counter graven image ! 

2. Another idol, or misrepresentation of 
God, is the conception of him as mainly 
ruler. 



Its Hunger after God. 6i 

He rules, no doubt; but even in that 
there is nothing arbitrary, wilful, or absolute 
in temper. He rules by virtue of righteous- 
ness and of love. He is God because he is 
good. Moreover, the idea of him as ruler, 
when most correct, is only one of many 
aspects of him. And yet almost our whole 
theology is keyed to this idea, — his sover- 
eignty, his laws, his jealousy for them, his 
punishments for those violating them, his 
wrath, his being unable to do this and that 
because he could not do it and be just, 
and very much more to the same effect. 

Perhaps you know a great and noble man, 
a parent perchance, a magistrate, a college 
president like Mark Hopkins. He rules .f* 
Certainly. But is not his ruling the smallest 
aspect of him } Are you thinking, any great 
part of the time, that such a one is a ruler, 
— he being so much else, and so wonderfully 
so much else ? So our Saviour has not 
much to say of God as ruler. He says some- 
thing of that; but mainly he speaks of him 
as Father ; as exercising a providential care 
over even the hairs of our heads ; as yearn- 



62 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

ing for the' prodigal's return ; as, like a true 
shepherd, having more joy of the lost sheep 
found than of the ninety and nine that went 
not astray. God, to the Saviour's thought, 
is one near us, with whom we may commune 
and become one, far more than a ruler. 

This primary proposition, then, of medi- 
aeval theology, which has colored nearly 
every article of our creeds, must, I will not 
say go, for there is some truth in it, but 
must drop to its subordinate and normal 
place, and yield to other as the predomi- 
nant aspects of God. 

3. Still another idol, or misrepresentation 
of him, is one which I hesitate to mention, 
because my meaning may readily be mis- 
understood. But I cannot conscientiously 
avoid doing so. I refer to our philosophy 
of the Trinity, in so far as it is put in the 
place of God, — and it is put there a great 
deal, as I cannot help believing. 

As a philosophy, although bunglingly ex- 
pressing itself, it is in my judgment true. 
I believe, that is to say, in the reality and 
eternity of those distinctions in God's being 



Its Hunger after God. 63 

which the terms Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit answer to. I am, in short, philosoph- 
ically a Trinitarian ; and by this philosophy 
I most readily explain to myself those Bib- 
lical expressions, — so that, to this degree, 
I may add that I am Biblically a Trinitarian. 
Hegel's philosophy, unless I mistake, would, 
if it went so far, turn out to be Trini- 
tarian. Much of the strongest thinking since 
Nicaea, early in the fourth century, has been 
Trinitarian. All this should weigh with a 
thoughtful person. 

But one must distinguish between his 
theory or philosophy of certain facts, how- 
ever venerable it may be, and the facts 
themselves. The facts are there. They 
cannot well be set aside. But our philos- 
ophy of the facts may be imperfect, or even 
mistaken. God, as Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit, is in the Bible, and is to a large 
degree in human experience. That is fact. 
But our fourth-century and Hegelian philos- 
ophy of it is quite another thing. It may 
be correct, — I think it correct ; but when I 
suppose that philosophy to compass God, 



64 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

and when I make representations accord- 
ingly, I attempt to measure him by the yard- 
stick of Athanasius, or of Hegel, or of my 
own mind ; and therein I am guilty, very 
possibly, of setting up an idol ; and all idols 
must come down. 

To the simple Biblical indications, and to 
those same indications in human experience, 
we cannot but adhere. But to a philosophy 
of them, which may or may not be correct, 
which certainly is extra-Biblical, and which 
has this ominous fact attending it, namely, 
that there have always been devout souls 
which could not accept it, — we may adhere 
personally, as I for one do ; but we have no 
right authoritatively to impose it on others. 
We are, in other words, for liberty's sake, 
and for the truth's sake, to stop representing 
that God is necessarily expressed by our phi- 
losophy of the Trinity ; but are, so far as we 
touch upon the subject, to represent that 
God is God, spoken of in the Bible as 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to a 
large degree so apprehended in human ex- 
perience. This is Biblical, factual, and 



Its Hunger after God. 65 

enough. What exceeds this verges toward 
image-making. It ought, moreover, — what 
is a burning shame, — no longer to separate 
Christian brethren. 

4. One more idol, or misrepresentation 
of God, lies in our too frequent insistence 
that God in Christ is mainly governmental 
or forensic in his purpose. 

Christ, according to this view, is almost 
entirely compassed by the idea that he be- 
came man, lived, suffered, and died, to get 
a law adjustment between sin, which God 
wished to forgive, and justice which pre- 
vented God from forgiving it. 

This idol was set up in the eleventh 
century ; for until that time the Church 
made Christ, the rather, to have been a 
negotiator with Satan for man's escape 
from hell. Since the eleventh century it 
has met with a variety of fortunes. 

It is, indeed, a sort of corollary from the 
exaggerated emphasis laid in earlier ages 
on the idea of God as ruler. It gets some 
support from certain passages in the New 
Testament; just as the earlier idea of Christ 

5 



66 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

as negotiating with Satan gets some support 
from certain other passages. But these 
passages are far from coextensive with the 
subject. There is a much wider range of 
Bible teaching. And the facts can never be 
included under this category. This its in- 
sufficiency was what compelled that investi- 
gation which led to my abandoning it, as 
intimated a few moments ago. 

Christ is a vital, living, present Saviour; 
not a law expedient. The latter interpreta- 
tion of him presupposes in God an attitude 
toward sin in his children for which, if you 
or I had the same toward sin in our childrenj 
we should loathe ourselves, or ought to. As 
you know, I depend wholly on Christ for 
salvation, that is, as the medium of spiritual 
life; but I should deny the truth as God 
gives me to see it if I explained his work 
forensically, and should, I am persuaded, be 
misrepresenting God likewise. 

Against, thus, a machine or mechanical 
conception of God ; against a conception 
of him which exaggerates his rulership out 
of all proportion to larger aspects of him ; 



Its Hunger after God. 67 

against a conception which limits the thought 
of him to a philosophy, approximating the 
truth, as I personally believe, but which may 
or may not be correct, which is extra-Biblical, 
and which is incapable of being received by 
not a few devout minds ; and against a con- 
ception of him which mainly interprets the 
glorious and life-affecting manifestation of 
himself in Christ by terms better suited to 
the law courts of the tyrannous Middle Ages, 
such as the " Merchant of Venice " brings 
before our minds, than to this age or to the 
facts, — against such conceptions of God, as 
misrepresentations of him, and as idols of 
the mind, the newer religious thinking utters 
its protest. 

I might instance others. In particular, I 
should like to speak of our ordinary thought 
as not giving God time enough, nor scope 
enough, to come down to now, or to go on 
from now, or to include his whole great uni- 
verse and his whole great family. But to do 
this to-night is impracticable. Besides, as 
examples, the idols already mentioned will 
suffice. 



68 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

Let me say, in closing, that the "gospel of 
the glory of the blessed God " has been un- 
speakably hurt by such misrepresentations. 
Because it has been so misrepresented, mul- 
titudes have wandered off into unbelief. 
Other multitudes have groped blindly after 
God, with sick hearts. The enemies of 
Christianity have made the most of such 
caricatures, and have summarily bowed it 
out of court. These caricatures, and others 
like them, are the stock in trade of rank and 
noisy infidelity. 

Brethren, the Church, the clergy, the laity, 
in fact all true souls, have herein a heavy 
responsibility laid on them. They are to 
think rightly of God, and speak rightly, and 
witness by true lives rightly for him. God 
help us all to do this! May open eyes, 
teachable minds, and receptive hearts be 
ours for that wideness and richness of truth, 
now discernible, for which prophets, apos- 
tles, and Christians from age to age waited, 
but received it not, " God having provided 
some better thing for us, that they without 
us should not be made perfect " ! 



ITS PASSION FOR MEN. 



SYNOPSIS. 

The passion for men of Moses and Saint Paul. — This 
characteristic of fresh thinkers : Throughout the Bible ; 
In Christian ages ; In the modern time (examples). — The 
connection between such thinking and this passion not 
accidental but necessary. — Consequent war of the newer 
religious thinking on certain traditional religious ideas in- 
consistent, as commonly understood, with an adequate view 
of man, namely : (i) Election and reprobation ; the self- 
sacrifice of the true, Biblical election ; (2) Man's sinful state ; 
only most figuratively a " child of wrath ; " (3) Worthless- 
ness of works when expressive of character; failure to 
apprehend the struggle of Christ and the apostles with 
the Jewish spirit underlies this perversion of Scripture ; 
(4) Man's access to God ; this vital^ rather than analogous 
to access to the Queen of England ; (5) Man's destiny ; mag- 
nitude of this question ; wanted upon it, more light, ampler 
data, and its re-study. — Consequent war, also, of the newer 
religious thinking on certain ideas and practices prevalent in 
society, namely : (i) Merely ease-producing remedies for 
the evils of society ; (2) Superficial remedies ; (3) Laissez 
faire; (4) Inordinate wealth and luxury; (5) Asceticism; 
(6) Unscientific living ; (7) The individualistic tendency. — 
" I will not cease from mental fight." 



III. 

ITS PASSION FOR MEN.i 

Yei now, if thou wilt forgive their sin — / and if not, 

blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast 

written. — Exodus xxxii. 32. 
For I could wish that I myself were anathema from 

Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen according 

to the flesh. — RoaiANS ix. 3. 

TN these words two great typical representa- 
tives of newer religious thinking in their 
time utter the passion of their souls. It is 
for men. 

Moses, stirred by larger religious thought, 
essays to free his people. " Sirs, ye are 
brethren," he pleads. Prevented from ac- 
complishing his object, long delayed, but at 
length entering upon and now amidst his 
great work, he finds that his people cannot 
rise to. his spiritual ideals, but revert to idol 
worship and to gross sensuousness. In such 

^ Prospect Street, Sunday night, November 20, 1892. 



72 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

a case they are repugnant to high moral law, 
and to God as conceived of under the alto- 
gether inadequate category of moral law. In 
such a plight, when destruction seems await- 
ing them, and when he himself is tempted to 
let them perish, and to become in his own 
person the founder of a truer nation, the 
God within him offsets the God of his pre- 
conception and pleads for his people with 
this sublime climax, " If [thou forgive them] 
not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book 
which thou hast written." 

Similarly, Saint Paul, the great new re- 
ligious thinker of early Christianity, would 
desire to be " accursed," or " separated," or 
" anathema," for his brethren's sake. 

This is one marked characteristic of fresh- 
ening religious thought. It freed Israel from 
Egypt. It rescued her anew and anew from 
her enemies. It led the Hebrew prophets, 
many of them heretics in their day, to be the 
most democratic of men, pleading for the poor, 
the oppressed, the outcast, against wealth, 
tyranny, and obloquy, — so that they became 
the forerunners of the liberators of succeed- 



Its Passion for Men, 'j^) 

ing ages, and by their utterances (together 
with those of the Hebrew lawgivers, who 
were actuated by the same spirit) laid as 
foundations those just principles of human 
conduct which many centuries later became 
the basis of the common law, and which 
have thus come to obtain for the modern 
world. 

Similarly, freshening religious thought 
broke into the petrified tyranny and cruelty 
of the Roman Empire, and deferred the over- 
throw of that empire by Christianizing it ; 
made a way for the tentative rise of free in- 
stitutions prior to the Reformation ; rendered 
possible, coincidently with the Reformation, 
far ampler freedom alike for Protestants and 
Catholics ; and is to-day the great humaniz- 
ing factor in a humanizing tendency which 
has become so universal that it characterizes 
many even of those who deny the very 
grounds for the existence of religion. 

In the past century and a half, for exam- 
ple, the fresher religious thinking under 
Edwards prepared the way for the indepen- 
dence of the American Colonies; and the 



74 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

fresher religious thinking of " Unevangeli- 
cals," so-called, like Channing and Parker, 
and of " Evangelicals," so-called, as seen in 
a fresher Andover theology^ New Haven 
theology, and New School Presbyterian 
theology, prepared the way for the over- 
throw of American slavery, in one of the 
most gigantic moral struggles of history. 
So in the mother country, Arnold, Robert- 
son, Maurice, and Kingsley, with many 
others, some of them passed on, and some 
of them still living, have been in the fore- 
front of those modifications of the English 
Commonwealth which have so mightily 
uplifted and benefited its congested popu- 
lations. 

And to-day the men who are least satis- 
fied with things as they are ; who are plung- 
ing deepest into social questions ; whose 
life-hold on political economy and on politics 
is most tenacious, are the men who see a 
new heavens and a new earth of religious 
thought and feeling, — some of them within 
so-called " evangelical " lines ; some of them 
liberals or radicals religiously ; and some of 



Its Passion for Men. 75 

them agnostics or unbelievers, but with a 
freshened and changed religious feeling, 
whatever their classification. In fact, the 
men are all about us, who conjoin with 
fresher and better thoughts of God fresher 
and better thoughts for men, — Catholic and 
Protestant, " Evangelical " and " Unevangel- 
ical," religious and (as they would call them- 
selves) non-religious, but, in the range that 
belongs of right to religion, new men, in the 
new time. " Ring out," they cry, in the 
lines of Tennyson, — 

" Ring out the feud of rich and poor, 
Ring in redress to all mankind. . . . 

" Ring out false pride in place and blood, 
The civic slander and the spite ; 
Ring in the love of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good." 

The High Church is working for the poor, 
and so is the Low Church ; formal Non- 
conformist, and informal Salvation Army 
man. There are the Saint Andrew's Brother- 
hood .man, and the Christian at Work ; 
Toynbee Hall, and Rivington Street Col- 
lege Settlement, and Prospect Union, and 



76 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

the Andover House. Fresher religious 
thinking, whatever its type, is plunging in, 
bound to rescue men ; while unfreshened 
religious thought, gathering its skirts about 
it, too often only offers a prayer, and 
passes the contribution box. The voice 
of the latter has too frequently put into 
polite phrase Cain's question, " Am I 
my brother's keeper 1 " The voice of the 
former, with Moses and Saint Paul, cries 
to God that it may be blotted out, or ac- 
cursed, if it cannot do something for its 
erring, sinning brothers. 

I. The first point to which I desire to call 
attention in this matter is that it is not by 
accident that a mighty passion for men has 
attended the newer religious thinking in 
times past and now, but that there is a 
necessary connection of cause and effect 
between them. 

Religion is the correlation of man and the 
Infinite. As, then, men enlarge their thought 
of the Infinite, the enlargement necessarily 
goes into the domain of man, as well as of 
God. God being more freshly, strongly. 



Its Passion for Men, jy 

deeply conceived of, man Is by consequence 
more freshly, strongly, deeply conceived of. 
The correlation carries them both. If so 
great, noble, and more and more largely con- 
ceived of a being as God is in a relation to 
men of which religion is the expression, how 
great, noble, and more and more largely to be 
conceived of is man also. The one involves 
the other. Or, to express it more simply: 
God, we will say, is Father, and men are his 
children. With the Father goes the child. 
The child gains in nobility from the Father. 
New, fresh, strong thoughts of God, then, 
carry with them new, fresh, strong thoughts 
of men. 

Hence, necessarily, did he who had seen 
the bush burning but not consumed, and the 
Sinai glory of God, and he also who had been 
caught up into the third heaven, yearn alike 
for the children of so glorious and good a 
God, and wish to be blotted out, or accursed, 
if their brethren might not also share the 
blessin-g. Or, as Saint John the Revelator 
put it, reversing the statement, " He that 
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, 



78 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

how can he love God whom he hath not 
seen ? " And hence necessarily also did 
those newer religious thinkers, the Hebrew 
lawgivers and prophets, become the fore- 
runners of the liberators and of the enlarged 
laws of mankind. 

Hence, too, necessarily did the newer 
Christianity defer the doom of the Roman 
Empire, and, yet more and more freshly 
conceived of, prepare the beginnings of lib- 
erty before the Reformation, and give the 
same in larger degree to Protestants and 
Catholics after the Reformation, and free our 
Colonies, and unshackle our slaves, and make 
the larger liberty of the England of to-day, 
and spread itself as a reforming and human- 
izing influence, pervasive as the atmosphere, 
in this last decade of the nineteenth centurv. 
The one involves the other. The enlarging 
and deepening thought of the correlation 
embraces the conception of man as well as 
the conception of God. And so is verified 
that profound saying of Saint Paul, " Where 
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." 

II. But, in the second place, the fresher 



Its Passion for Men. 79 

thought of man, consequent on the fresher 
thought of God in the newer religious think- 
ing, puts that thinking at war not only with 
certain current ideas of God, as we saw in the 
last discourse, but also with certain current 
ideas of man. 

I. The current theology regarding man 
runs, for example, among men a line of elec- 
tion and reprobation. 

True, this is very little spoken of now; 
but it is unretracted, and lingers as an influ- 
encing element in men's thinking. Accord- 
ing to this view, the elect are chosen of God 
for blessing, and the non-elect for cursing. 
In apparent favor of this view are some Bible 
expressions, like that about the vessels made 
by a potter, some to honor and some to dis- 
honor. But from an ampler thought of God 
it follows that man, his child, is not to be 
treated in that way. You could not treat 
your child in that way without running 
counter to human law, and much more, to 
the law of God. 

That passion for men which characterizes 
the newer religious thinking presses, there- 



8o The Newer Religiotis Thinking, 

fore, a more adequate study of this doctrine 
of election and reprobation. From this it 
appears that the doctrine, as presented in the 
Bible, occurs there mainly in consolatory 
passages, as in the eighth of the Romans, 
where it is urged for comfort and reassurance 
that God has chosen the reader, and is on 
his side. From this study it also appears 
that the chief elect one in the Old Testament 
is Abraham, chosen that in him all nations 
might be blessed; and that the chief elect 
one in the New Testament is the Lord Jesus, 
who is chosen that men may be saved, and 
all men drawn to him. 

The elect, in short, as another has phrased 
it, " are elect for the non-elect." Not partial- 
ism, but benevolence, self-sacrifice, as in the 
case of Abraham and the Saviour, and yearn- 
ing for the good of all, are in this truth. 

2. Again, the newer religious thinking 
cannot regard man so ill as did the older 
thought. 

It thinks as ill of sin as ever. Evil, it is 
sure, is evil and nothing else. But it con- 
ceives of sin more justly. It considers that 



Its Passion for Men. 8i 

sin has come from outside influences in part ; 
that blindness is in greater or less degree its 
cause ; and that that part of it — and it is 
a large part — which is wilful and designing, 
grows out of a mistaken or insufficient idea 
of God and of right, even as a wilfully sin- 
ning child is such, generally, through not 
having had its heart touched by love into 
nobler and better things. 

Love, the newer religious thinking knows, 
can penetrate the hardest heart, afford it 
vision, stir its aspirations, and mould it, it 
trusts, into nobler life. Love, in other words, 
changes the point of view. What law can- 
not do, a new spirit called into exercise can. 
Saint Paul has the philosophy of it : " The 
law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made 
me free from the law of sin and of death." 
Accordingly, man being such, and so redeem- 
able, the newer religious thinking realizes, 
with Scripture, how much that is noble and 
lovable resides in every human soul. As the 
Saviour could find it, so this thinking finds 
it. Fallen indeed is man from the heights 
he might have attained, of truth, right, and 

6 



82 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

love ; but he is still God's child, and only in 
a most figurative and exceptional sense a 
"child of wrath." 

In brief, the newer religious thinking 
believes that man, fallen in such a sense, is 
still nigh to God, dear to him, and in some 
genuine sense still not fallen, but true, and 
with something of God in him. This some- 
thing it sets itself to seek, to love, to develop, 
and to thank God for. 

3. The newer religious thinking deplores 
also the exaggeration of truth in the old 
doctrine of the worthlessness of works. 

" Not of works, lest any man should boast," 
says Saint Paul ; and his caveat ought to 
explain his meaning. It is a Jewish mean- 
ing. The Jew was seeking works as he was 
seeking gold, to be proud of, and to felici- 
tate himself and indulge himself withal. The 
more gold, the more pride and ease. The 
more works, the more pride and ease like- 
wise. Of that kind of goodness, then, the 
more the worse, since it was assumed for 
effect, a mere matter of boasting, a thing 
of the outside and not of the heart. It was 



Its Passion for Men. ^'^^ 

upon this false Jewish idea of righteousness 
that Christ and the apostles flung their lives 
in protest. The real thing, they contended, 
was utterly other than this. " Except your 
righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." 

What a perversion, now, it is to take this 
evil, which was peculiar, in great measure 
local, and the conspicuous trait of a deca- 
dent national religion, and formulate from 
it the doctrine that good conduct counts for 
nothing ! It counts, being real and from 
the heart, for everything. As clothes put 
on, as something assumed, it is insincerity, 
hypocrisy, an object, not for boasting (" lest 
any man should boast "), but for contempt. 
But as a real thing, as springing from the 
heart, as an expression of character, and 
as in that sense an embodiment of faith, it 
is precious alike with God and with men. 
" Thine alms are had in remembrance in 
the sight of God," exclaims the angel to 
Cornelius. " I will show thee my faith by 
my works," writes Saint James. 



84 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

The newer religious thinking, therefore, 
while depending in all things on God, and 
while valuing as beyond price those Christly 
motives which issue in the noblest living, 
begs leave at the same time, as it thinks 
better of God, so also to think better of 
man, God's child, than longer to undervalue 
or think lightly of true, heart-inspired good 
conduct. 

4. Nor can the newer religious thinking, 
though resting alone, in the case of many 
of its representatives, on Christ as the chan- 
nel or medium, realized or unrealized, of 
access to God, any longer believe that access 
to God is exclusively, as a matter of terms, 
through Christ. 

God is too real, too omnipresent, too imma- 
nent in man, for there to be any such literal 
mediating as the old doctrine assumed. 
Rather, as many believe, does God in Christ 
so seek men, whether they realize it or not, 
that he finds them ; and, in their sincere 
response to his seeking, whatever the form 
of their response, they have access to God. 
In some such sense as this, through Christ, 



Its Passion for Men. 85 

whether known by them or not, men find 
God ; but not necessarily through Christ 
outwardly, in terms, and by way of formality. 
It might be expressed thus : Christ is the 
manward side of God. Through him access 
is thus had. But not formally, diplomati- 
cally, forensically, or even, necessarily, as 
matter of knowledge, but rather vitally. 

The newer religious thinking ventures, in 
other words, not to think so ill of man, as 
God's child, as to suppose that his access 
to God is analogous to access to the Queen 
of England. " I was found of them that 
sought me not," says Scripture. 

5. Once more, regarding the destiny of 
man as God's child, the newer religious 
thinking begs leave to accept no dictum of 
mediaeval theology, no dictum of a super- 
ficial interpretation of Scripture, no dictum 
not consonant with the whole conception 
of man derivable from nature, from history, 
from that charter of religious freedom, if 
rightly -used, the Bible, and from the heart 
of man under the influence of God's Spirit. 

According to the most conservative sci- 



86 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

entific estimates, man has been on the earth 
vastly longer than six thousand years, the 
period set by the old chronology. What 
was he doing ? What was God doing with 
him ? He was unfolding, by slow degrees, 
on both hemispheres, into being man as we 
know man. Was God hurling him into 
hell for that beneficent work, savage though 
he was ? At an analogous stage of unfold- 
ing are some peoples now living on this 
planet. What is God doing with them .? 
Hurling them into hell likewise } Then 
should good men wish, with Saint Paul, to 
be accursed with them, to follow them, 
love them, and, if it might be, to bring 
them back. 

Oh ! these questions pressed on us by our 
enlarging knowledge ! What is the destiny 
of man as a race on this planet ? What is 
the destiny of man, individually considered, 
after leaving this planet ? We can neither, 
on the one hand, answer these questions 
with a benevolent optimism, hoping for the 
best, — because, unfortunately, there is much 
in the survey which looks by no means 



Its Passion for Men, 87 

toward the best, but toward the worst, — nor, 
on the other hand, with the theologians of 
an age which, for frequent offences, burnt 
people, flayed them alive, and tortured them, 
can we hasten to remand them to hell 
torments. 

What we want, on this subject, is more 
light, a re-study of the whole matter, ampler 
data and more comprehensive generalization. 
Many are now engaged in this. For myself, 
while this pursuit is outside the range of my 
own special studies, I frankly confess that I 
am unable to resist the hope that God's love 
will yet find all souls ; nor the hope that, 
here and hereafter, I, in common with all 
who love him, may be used as a means for 
his love to find all souls. But neither can I 
resist the impression that it may be possible 
for a soul always to withstand God's love. I 
cannot, consequently, be a Universalist in 
doctrine. At the same time my hope for 
the future of every spirit that God ever 
created is as infinite as God is infinite. 

Of the newer religious thinking, then, I 
may summarily state, that it is devoutly re- 



88 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

studying this whole subject, impelled thereto 
by that larger thought of man which the 
larger thought of God necessitates; and that, 
while it is teachable, and feels that it has 
much to learn, it is at the same time at war 
with ideas on this subject, long prevalent, in- 
deed, but alike dishonoring to God and man. 

Thus in respect to the doctrine of election, 
of man's sinful state, of conduct when expres- 
sive of character, of man's access to God, and 
of man's destiny, not to mention others, the 
newer religious thinking is at war with the 
hard and fast conclusions of an earlier theo- 
logy; and, while it recognizes much truth in 
the old positions, and in respect to them, 
rightly apprehended, is not destructive but 
constructive, it claims at the same time the 
right to re-study them, and more justly, 
reasonably, and honorably alike to God and 
man, to interpret them afresh. 

III. In conclusion I can state hardly 
more than in propositions some particulars 
in which the newer religious thinking, be- 
cause of its passion for men, is at war with 
society, cries aloud, and spares not. 



Its Passion for Men. 89 

1. The newer religious thinking does not 
believe that man lives by bread alone. 

Any proposed renovation of society, there- 
fore, by contrivances, like Mr. Bellamy's, to 
take the hardness out of life, to make every- 
thing easy, to have done with the struggle, 
to have reconstructed society into an organ- 
ism working with precision like a factory, is, 
in its judgment, like the holiness scheme in 
religion, while worthy in more or less re- 
spects, substantially a device to construct 
moral weaklings. Not what we have en- 
joyed, but what we have suffered, — even as 
One of old was made " perfect through suf- 
ferings," — has probably most benefited you 
and me. 

The remedy must not involve the sacrifice 
of anything truly educational, tonic, and 
character-affecting in the present order. 

2. Similarly, the newer religious thinking 
is shy of any proposed remedies for the evils 
of mankind which ignore the very great 
complexities of the problem. 

The problem is vast. The wisest knows 
little about it. Man and man's good, which 



90 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

unnumbered ages have only brought to the 
present stage, are too nearly infinite, having 
an infinite parentage, and are too little as yet 
within the range of our comprehension, to 
be fathomed in a day, a year, a century, or 
an epoch. That is one of the mighty 
teachings of the "Idyls of the King": — 

" And slowly answered Arthur from the barge : 
* The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfils himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' " 

The newer religious thinking, therefore, 
is lowly, cautious, tentative, teachable, recep- 
tive in these matters. 

3. But, on the other hand, it is not so 
very meek after all. It has declared war on 
some things, and will not capitulate. One 
of them is laissez faire. 

Every man for himself and the devil take 
the hindmost is not its doctrine. The 
older thinking might live along with such a 
theory, having, under its category of justice, 
done no wrong; but the newer thinking can- 
not abide it. Let it, on the contrary, go to the 
devil with the hindmost, and be blotted out 



Its Passion for Men, 91 

or accursed with the same, rather than en- 
counter the self-condemnation of having had 
no pity on the hindmost, and of letting him 
go to the devil with none to help. 

It believes that capital has rights ; also, 
that labor has rights. The indifference of 
capital to labor, in multitudes of cases, it 
believes to be as wrong in principle as the 
indifference of labor to capital when it sets 
costly buildings on fire. When labor destroys 
capital it does a great wrong, for which it 
should suffer the severe penalties of the 
law. But it only does, bluntly and out and 
out, against capital what capital, by indirect 
and legal methods and by indifference, fre- 
quently does against labor, impoverishing it, 
crushing it, — yes, and through want and 
misery often slaying it. The murders 
wrought, all legally by capital, will, in the 
eyes of the just Judge, far outnumber the 
murders by riot and violence which labor 
has committed ; and every one of them will 
be wicked in the eyes of that Judge. 

The destruction of New York Central 
property at Buffalo last summer by labor. 



92 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

and particularly the interruption of travel 
over a highway of national importance, are 
to me simply abominable. But so to me 
also is that vast railway system simply abom- 
inable. Grind the poor, proceed by laissez 
faire, let God's child, your brother, sink 
whither the miner under the coal combina- 
tion, and the over-worked railway employee 
under the railroad monopoly sink, and con- 
demn them for fire and bloodshed ? Yes. 
And if necessary, shoot them or hang them. 
Before God, they deserve it. But you, 
ye rich men, ye mighty combinations of 
moneyed tyranny, proceeding all legally, 
as our statute books allow, to oppress the 
poor, — ye, too, are guilty, sinning, more- 
over, under great light, great opportunity, 
and great self-aggrandizement. " He that 
is without sin among you, let him first 
cast a stone." ^ 

^ What is here said regarding capital and labor needs 
amplification. The spirit of such amplification would be 
understood by those who heard me. For the reader, I 
add: — 

(i) The corporation referred to is not a sinner above 
many others. Nor is it, in common with many others, at 



Its Passion for Men. 93 

4. The newer religious thinking is also 
at war with the inordinate getting of wealth, 
and the luxurious enjoyment of it. 

Wealth is good, gotten within bounds, 
rightly acquired, and rightly used ; but to get 
it beyond bounds, to acquire it by question- 
able methods, and in any case self-indulgently 
to roll in its luxury, — this is to sin against 
what wealth means, namely, untold toil, sweat, 
and often blood ; and it is to sin against the 
millions who are either starving, or know 
not whither to look for the next meal. 

fault throughout, for it is lacking neither in commendable 
points of administration, nor in admirable managers. 

(2) On the other hand, as regards organized labor, 
exigencies might arise where violence on its part would be 
justifiable. The tenet of non-resistance is hardly of univer- 
sal application. 

(3) Having said thus much in qualification of the vigor- 
ous language used above, I reaffirm it in the spirit in which 
I intended it, and as vehemently. For, in this age of the 
world, and in the light, I will not say of the Gospel, but of 
those economic principles with which the Gospel is replete, 
capital has no right, as a matter of economics, other than to 
work intelligently, obviously, and devotedly for the good of 
labor ; and a reciprocal obligation, on the same grounds, is 
laid upon labor. Without their marriage the world cannot 
go forward. The household which they constitute has no 
right to be divided against itself. " No man ever yet hated 
his own flesh." 



94 The Neiver Religious Thinking. 

And that is what this land is doing, — 
having the most favorable country and gov- 
ernment in the world, yet stretching every 
nerve to outdo the other nations, to see that 
the products of the skill of the poor laborers 
of other lands shall not come hither, and to 
get, get, get, and keep, keep, keep, adding 
field to field, property to property, trust to 
trust, monopoly to monopoly, — while the 
poor man grows poorer, and it is harder and 
yet harder to get on, and the wretched vic- 
tims of such a spirit blaspheme the God 
whom extortioners, in too many instances, 
profess to worship in gilded temples dedi- 
cated to his name. Of this there will be an 
end and a judgment. 

5. It is only just to say that, as the newer 
religious thinking is at war with luxury, it is 
also at war with asceticism. 

Asceticism is a running away from manful 
moral conflict. It is bad for the body, which 
is made for right joys. It is bad for the 
mind, which needs relaxation. It issues 
often in calamity to the spiritual nature. 
Nor is it necessary as a discipline ; for this 



Its Passion for Men. 95 

world is hard enough at best, has pain 
enough, heart-ache enough, trouble enough. 

The right and pure use of every good gift 
of God, and the real self-denial involved in 
unselfishness, nobility of character, and brav- 
est, truest thought, — these should take the 
place so long usurped by the artificial self- 
denial and discipline of asceticism. 

6. The newer religious thinking, too, is at 
war with unscientific living. 

In the rich this brings pampering, and too 
great comfort, and the limiting of families, 
and presently deterioration. And in the 
poor this leads to conditions utterly un- 
healthful, wasteful, and often fatal. 

To regard the human body, mind, and 
spirit, and to regard the environment and 
conditions of life of these, as a manifestation 
of a divine wisdom, and discreetly and intel- 
ligently, or, in one word, scientifically, to use 
them, — this is duty ; and the contrary, how- 
ever well-meaning it may be, is sin. 

7. To name only one other point, the 
newer religious thinking is at war with the 
individualistic tendency. 



96 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

It was, I think, Maurice, who said, at the 
time of Wordsworth's death, that he was 
the last great man of the age that was pass- 
ing away, — the age of individualizing, intro- 
spection, and self-elaborating, however well 
meant, as in Wordsworth's case, these might 
be. And he was right, and wrong: right in 
that with more recent great men the drift is 
in the other direction, as it is with the time 
itself ; and yet wrong, for the tendency, 
often indeed beautiful, lives on still. 

The newer religious thinking reveres the 
individual, wishes it all most harmonious 
development, but knows wtII that there is 
only one law of life in this respect ; namely, 
" None of us liveth to himself, and none 
dieth to himself." Only in realizing and 
fulfilling this law, in merging one's life into 
the lives of others, and into, as it were, the 
corporate life of the community, the State, 
and the age, can one individually come to 
the most, or be the most for others. " He 
that is greatest among you shall be your 
servant." 

Thus in putting little faith either in ease- 



Its Passion for Men. 97 

producing, or in superficial remedies for 
the evils of society ; and in withstanding 
laissez faire, inordinate wealth and luxury, 
asceticism, unscientific living, and the indi- 
vidualistic tendency, not to mention other 
particulars, the newer religious thinking is at 
mental war with society. It makes its own 
the sentiment of one of this temper beyond 
the seas : — 

" I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,. 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England's green and pleasant land." 



Where'er a htunan heart doth wear 
Joy's myrtle-wreath or sorrow'' s gyves. 
Where'er a hu77tan spirit strives 
After a life more true and fair, 
There is the true 7nan''s birthplace grand^ 
His is a world-wide fatherland I 

Where'er a single slave doth piiie, 

Wherever 07ie man may help a7tother, — 
Thank God for such a bi7'thright, brother, — 

That spot of earth is thi7ie a7id 77ti7ie I 

There is the trtie 7nan^s birthplace grand. 

His is a world-wide fatherla7id / 

James Russell Lowell. 



ITS THOUGHT OF NATURE, HISTORY, 
LIFE. 



SYNOPSIS. 

Threefold category of the world, as Nature, History, and 
Life. — These a means of perceiving " the invisible things 
of him." — The newer religious thinking called to confront, 
not only truth as manifested in the Bible, but truth as mani- 
fested in these. — It must listen to the whole oracle, to the 
whole truth, not to a part of it. — This solemn and momen- 
tous, (i) As counter to tradition, and therefore sure to 
meet with opposition, working various ills, but particularly 
within a man ; (2) As tentative, therefore liable to err, and 
that in matters of the utmost moment ; (3) In view of the 
high qualities of mind and heart which it requires. — But it 
has received its call and must obey. — Sympathy, love, prayer, 
fitter to be given it than revihng. — Its reverence for the 
world under this threefold category. — Bible in hand, it will 
listen thereto, compare, learn, and derive, no matter by how 
slow processes, the ampler, better balanced, more rational, 
more heart-affecting truth. — The Bible enjoins this ; its an- 
swer to the question, Whither is all this tending 1 — Attitude, 
in particular, of the newer religious thinking toward, (i) The 
widening apprehension of the boundaries of space and time ; 
(2) The widening thought of how life and how man came to 
be ; (3) Other studies, especially those of force and psychic 
energy ; (4) The means, now at hand, for approximating 
accurate historical knowledge ; thus {a) What impelled the 
great migrations ? What are the race impulses, Semitic, 
Latin, Germanic, Celtic, etc. ? and {b^ What testimony for 
the world has all truly creative literature ? (5) Life ; this last 
the ultimate, the test. — " I came that they may have life." 



IV. 



ITS THOUGHT OF NATURE, HISTORY, 
LIFE.i 

The invisible things of him since the creation of the world 
are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that 
are ?fiade. — Romans i. 20. 

T^HERE lies all about us a threefold, 
wonderful world. In its first aspect, 
it is the world itself, with its surrounding, 
shining worlds, with its infinite vast of space, 
with its cloud-banks of stars, with its awe- 
full distances and silences. These speak 
to the soul of man with a voice fuller of 
meaning than any articulate speech. They 
are the ground facts of our being. They 
are the background and foreground of exist- 
ence. In the words of a poet of old : — 

" There is no speech nor language ; 
Their voice cannot be heard. 
Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
And their words to the end of the world." 

1 Prospect Street, Sunday night, November 27, 1892. 



I02 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

But this is only the first aspect. The 
thoughts which you and I have had of the 
world, others have had before us, and others 
will have after us. The universe is such 
that it begets thought, feeling, impulse, ac- 
tion, the ongoing of events, the march of 
history. The most interesting thing about 
the sun is not the sun itself, nor its light 
and warmth, but how it affects the men who 
behold it. The most interesting thing about 
the stars is not their distance, their splendor, 
their value to navigation, their place in the 
nautical almanac, but how they stir thought. 
A mountain, a sea view, a winding river, a 
brook sparkling and laughing through for- 
est and meadow, the glory of a peaceful 
sunset, all red, and golden, and purple, and am- 
ber, the grandeur of dark, frowning clouds, 
of forked lightning, and of deafening and 
blinding tempest, — these are not so fine as 
the emotions which they awaken in the 
soul, as the impulses which they impart to 
men, and as their formative influence on 
individuals and on peoples. What adds an 
inexpressible tenderness to sea-bordered Ayr- 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life, 103 

shire, to the mountains and tarns of Cum- 
berland and Westmorland, and to the weird 
Scottish border, is the fact that here were 
born, and here were developed, men who 
helped restore thinking peoples, warped off 
in other directions, to a normal attitude of 
expectancy and teachableness toward the 
influences of the world about them. Burns, 
as another has said, " the greatest lyrist 
since Pindar," Wordsworth, the high priest 
of this reverence for nature, and others 
who moved with them, wrought this for the 
modern time. 

We have, thus, nature itself ; and then the 
thinking and conduct of men, nature-im- 
pelled, as they have come down through 
time, — that is to say, we have history. 
But there is yet a third aspect of the 
world ; not it itself, nor its unfolding pro- 
cess through men, but present and now, 
throbbing and responsive, yearning, hunger- 
ing, aspiring, full of fresh traits, new differ- 
entiations, and still awaking powers, — the 
life of the world. This is the newest thing, 
newer this year than last year, this Sunday 



I04 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

than last Sunday, this moment than the last 
moment, — life. Life is more than nature ; 
rather, it is nature breathing, feeling, think- 
ing, doing. And life is more than history; 
rather, it is history brought down to date, 
and in process of making. And nature, his- 
tory, life, are the threefold, meaningful sub- 
stance of the world ; so that when the 
Apostle states for us our principle, saying, 
" The invisible things of him since the cre- 
ation of the world are clearly seen, being 
perceived through the things that are made," 
he means more than the world itself, or 
nature ; for with nature, and inseparable 
from it, is what nature comes to, namely, 
the march of events or history ; and with 
nature and history, and inseparable from 
them, is what we may call nature alive, or 
history brought down to date, namely, life. 

Thus it comes about that nature, history, 
and life are the world expressed in adequate 
terms ; and it is these which, as the Apostle 
declares, manifest forth, as things made 
since the creation of the world, the invis- 
ible things of God, — that is, his thoughts, 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life. 105 

feelings, purposes, character, " even," as the 
Apostle adds, " his everlasting power and 
divinity." 

Now the solemn and momentous fact 
about the newer religious thinking is that 
it deems itself charged, as the newer re- 
ligious thinking of no preceding period has 
deemed itself charged, with the responsibility 
of confronting not only truth as manifested 
in the Bible, but truth as manifested in na- 
ture, history, and life. 

It is sure that truth is truth ; that there is 
no schism in it ; that it matches all around ; 
that there can be no authority, even in the 
Bible, to contravene the authority of God's 
manifestation of himself in the world. As 
the prophet who felt himself impelled by a 
divine command to return at once out of 
Israel after delivering his prophecy, is rep- 
resented to have lost his life because he 
credited a contradiction of the divine com- 
mand uttered to him by a brother prophet, 
then lying, and tarried ; and as the Saviour 
rescued from the divine authority of Moses 
the diviner authority of nature, saying, 



io6 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

" Moses for your hardness of heart suffered 
you to put away your wives : but from the 
beginning it hath not been so," — similarly, 
in principle, does the newer religious think- 
ing feel called upon to listen to the whole 
oracle, not to a part of it ; to the whole truth, 
not to a part of it ; to the Book of Nature as 
well as to the Book of Grace ; to the whole 
history of man as well as to the history of 
Israel ; to the present life of the world as 
well as to that life as it inspired prophets 
and apostles ; and to interpret them respec- 
tively in their blended light. 

Of the Book of Grace, of the history of 
Israel, and of the inspired life of prophets 
and apostles, I shall speak next Sunday 
night. Of the Book of Nature, of the whole 
history of man, and of the present life of the 
world, as they lie before the newer religious 
thinking, I am to speak this evening. 

I. Let me say, in the first place, that this 
duty of listening to the whole oracle and of 
hearing the whole truth, which I have char- 
acterized as solemn and momentous, is so 
for several reasons. 



Its Thought of Nature history, Life. 107 

I. One of them is that it runs counter to 
the traditions of many centuries. Galileo 
suffered for affirming planetary revolutions. 
Copernicus dared not print his astronomy 
until about to die. Both were deemed guilty 
because they would hear the whole truth in 
their lines of research, not a part of it. One 
has only to keep his eyes open as he scans 
the papers, and his ears alert as he walks 
the earth, to learn that a like guilt is still 
adjudged the men who will hear the whole 
truth. 

It is solemn and momentous to take such 
a step. Not only is it not pleasant, but it 
limits one's usefulness. It keeps a man in 
America, who ought to be a foreign mis- 
sionary, — even as I, this week, have received 
a letter from the mother of such a one, 
rejected, though from a conservative point of 
view worthy to go, and though his mother, 
herself an indefatigable worker for foreign 
missions for many years, wished to give him, 
her only son, to the work; the ground of 
rejection being technically of another sort, 
but having an inseparable connection with 



io8 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

the purpose to hold back men of the newer 
thinking from the Christly work of bringing 
the " Good News " to the heathen. 

It renders a man working at home the 
object not only of ill speech, but of vague 
suspicion and more or less general distrust. 

What is far worse, such is psychic action 
that the person thus limited and hindered, if 
not well balanced, is apt to be impelled to 
greater lengths of opinion than would nor- 
mally be the case, even as persecution begets 
fanaticism in those capable of it. On the 
other hand, if the person is well-balanced, so 
that he keeps a poise and symmetry of 
opinion, he is apt to be depressed in spirit, 
and not to develop joyously in his work, as 
ought to be the case in order to a man's best 
serviceableness. 

In short, not only the guilt judged upon 
those who dare to hear the whole oracle, and 
listen to the whole truth, but the unfortunate 
consequences of it outwardly in limitation of 
work and restriction of influence, and in- 
wardly in its psychic effect, render this duty 
of the newer religious thinking solemn and 
momentous. 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life, 109 

2. Another consideration in the same 
direction is the tentative nature of these new 
interrogations of truth. 

We are only in the beginnings of our 
ampler knowledge of nature, of history, and of 
life, and there is large consequent liability to 
mistake as we study them. So, too, the 
relative weight, or the correlation, of the two 
lines of truth is a tentative science, liable to 
error. Great, moreover, must needs be the 
ill-consequences of mistakes in matters of so 
grave a nature. One breaks new ground, 
sails a sea not yet duly provided with charts, 
may readily err, and finds himself conse- 
quently in tremendously serious business 
from this point of view. 

3. It is tremendously serious business, 
also, in view of those prodigious studies, of 
that careful and unbiassed thinking, of that 
courage and persistence, of that tact and 
fearlessness, of that thoroughness, and of that 
combined mental coolness and heart warmth, 
all of which are required of the newer reli- 
gious thinking in this aspect of the case. 

How little do those who lightly animad- 



no The Newer Religious Thinking, 

vert upon the consecrated Christian scholars 
engaged in various departments of this one 
general work realize what qualities must be 
in these men to start with ; what toils, what 
stresses of mind, and what fortitude amidst 
evil report, must be constantly exercised by 
them ; and how they are, in this respect, like 
those who through much pain, loss, and 
opprobrium have won for the world some 
of its most precious discoveries, and most 
gracious emancipations! What an awaking 
by and by it will be for the maligners of such 
men to find that, as their fathers slew many 
a prophet, they have practically been doing 
the same thing to these ! May they be 
accorded greater mercy then than their es- 
chatology allows ! 

But there is only one thing for the newer 
religious thinking to do. It has received 
its call. It must obey. Counting no cost, 
shrinking from no peril, dismayed by no ar- 
duousness of the task, it must gird up its 
loins and march out into the untried. To the 
struggling present, to the unborn future, to 
the God after whom it hungers, to the men. 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life, iii 

his children, who are the objects of its holy 
passion, it must not be found wanting. 
Think of it, friends, as it prosecutes its task, 
not with ill will against it as destructive ; not 
with uncharitable thoughts of it, as if it were 
wilful, wayward, and going forward for the 
pleasure of it; but rather, with thoughts of 
sympathy and of love, as for that which is 
called to solemn, momentous, character-test- 
ing responsibility, and is seeking to discharge 
that responsibility, in the fear of God. Such 
it is. Let us treat it accordingly. May it be 
in our prayers. May God bless it ! 

II. Let me say, in the second place, with 
regard to the world as comprehended under 
the categories of nature, history, and life, that 
the newer religious thinking faces it with 
reverence and expectation. Here are the 
facts. Here are the data. It is of God as 
related to these that the Bible speaks. It is 
of these as related to God that the world 
speaks. The two are one book; each is 
key to the other ; each is supplemental to 
the other; each interprets the other. 

What nature is, how it unfolds, what its 



112 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

types are, what its spirit is, whence it origi- 
nates, whither it tends, — these are questions 
best answered by interrogating nature itself. 
It has a right to testify in its own behalf. 

Similarly of the progress of events, or of 
history. When did man appear on the 
earth, where, and under what conditions } 
How did he unfold 't Was his original con- 
dition that of infantile innocence, followed 
by a great catastrophe of his moral nature; 
or is the Genesis account of this matter a 
spiritualized representation of crises in the 
individual life ? How did institutions origi- 
nate? Was the order patriarchal, then the- 
ocratic, then despotic, then individualizing, 
or what was the order } Was Israel first 
under priests and then under prophets, or 
vice versa 1 In short, of men, of nations, of 
tendencies, what are the facts ? And on the 
facts what light does the Bible throw .f* And 
on the Bible what light do the facts throw t 
All these are parts of a whole. What is the 
whole ? And what does it testify to us } 

Similarly of life now. What is this great 
load of it which the globe is carrying } — 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life. 113 

the blubber-eating, ice-hut-Inhabiting Esqui- 
maux, the degraded cannibals, the sombre 
masses of semicivilized nations, the throng- 
ing populations of Christendom, the passions, 
faults, virtues, hungerings, aspirings of them 
all ? Is our thought large enough, compre- 
hensive enough, teachable enough for all 
this ? Is God manifesting himself in all 
this, or only in a part of it? And what 
is life, this flood of energy that emerges 
into consciousness, that thinks, experiences, 
feels, loves, hates, and reaches out after some 
unknown satisfaction, seemingly as various 
as the individuals are various ? Is it an in- 
trinsic thing, individual and immortal, or is 
it a something that characterizes the mass, 
and passes away with the mass as that de- 
scends to the grave ? You and I have each 
our answer to all this. The Bible affords 
us strong indications and presumptions re- 
garding all this. But all this, duly studied, 
answering for itself, and full of meaning and 
enlightenment for us, is what we want. 

Now the new^er religious thinking is rever- 
ent toward all this, as the w^ork of God ; and 



114 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

is full of expectation toward it, as manifest- 
ing forth God; and proposes to neglect 
nothing of it, lest in doing so, it should miss 
something of God, even as naught was to be 
omitted from Holy Writ. God, it is sure, 
cannot disagree with himself. The God in 
the world and the God in the Bible cannot 
be two, but must be one. And the newer 
religious thinking lays its ear close to the 
heart of nature, close to the phonograph of 
history, close to the throbbing bosom of life, 
Bible in hand, to listen, compare, learn, and 
derive, no matter by how slow processes, the 
ampler, better balanced, more rational, more 
heart-affecting truth. And it does so, not 
only because, like Luther, it " cannot other- 
wise," but because the Bible bids it to, say- 
ing, " The heavens declare the glory of God ; " 
saying, " Consider the lilies of the field, how 
they grow;" saying, "The invisible things 
of him since the creation of the world are 
clearly seen, being perceived through the 
things that are made." 

And if the heart falters; if one asks, 
" Whither is all this tending? " if it seems as 



lis Thought of Nature, History^ Life. 115 

if the old were passing away, and the new 
were all in uncertainty, then are heard the 
words, " I have yet many things to say unto 
you, but ye cannot bear them now; " and the 
words, " When he, the Spirit of truth, is 
come, he shall guide you into all the truth." 
For each age has seen only in a mirror, 
darkly ; the thinking of the past has largely 
yielded to far better thinking ; and as there 
were ages and orders in geology, each imper- 
fect, each preparative to another, and each 
passing away, so there are ages and orders 
of thought, and of religious thought. We 
apprehend very imperfectly, and the one 
thing to do is to get all the truth we can, 
and live it out into golden deeds, and ex- 
pect ampler truth to break forth, by means 
of the golden deeds of the present, for the 
men that shall come after us, and shall be 
surprised at our limited vision, even as we 
are surprised at the same limitation in those 
who have gone before us. " Behold, I make 
all things new," saith God ; and he is ever 
verifying that word. Let us, then, be well 
content that this is so, and not borrow 



1 1 6 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

trouble, but press fearlessly, truthfully, livingly 
forward. Not in what is now present, but 
in that which is to be, shall perfection and 
finality reside ; but it is for us to further that, 
and to be sharers in its glory by and by. 

III. If I have now sufficiently indicated 
the solemn and momentous nature of the 
task laid upon the newer religious thinking, 
namely, to listen to the whole oracle, and 
hear all the truth ; and if I have sufficiently 
suggested with what reverence and expecta- 
tion the newer religious thinking is interro- 
gating nature, history, and life, or, in one 
word, the world, as the work of God, as 
manifesting forth God, and as able to illu- 
minate the Bible, even as the Bible illumi- 
nates it, — permit me to name, in conclusion, 
certain specific points as characteristic of 
this newer approach to nature, history, and 
life. 

I. And, first, if we are to admit the objec- 
tive reality of the universe, — that is to say, 
if we do not conclude that the universe is 
only an objectivization of thought or of 
mind, — space must speak to us in a Ian- 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life, 117 

guage far more impressive than has been the 
case in the past; and so must time. 

For, on the one hand, the progress in as- 
tronomy, the revelations of the great tele- 
scopes, the more accurate mapping of the 
heavens, the better apprehension of the 
movements of the so-called fixed stars, the 
story told us by star-dust and nebulas, and 
the more adequate apprehension of the origin 
of such groups of celestial bodies as our 
solar system, — all these impress the mind 
with the vastness of space, with the fulness 
of it, with the seemingly endless cycles of 
its stellar movements, and with the small 
part our planet has to play in so great an 
order, and yet with the mighty persistence 
of our planet's part in it. And, on the other 
hand, all this is becoming so much better 
known, and is so entering into the ordinary 
comprehension even of children, that its 
effect on the mind is being greatly extended. 
The facts, and the apprehension of the facts, 
in short, cannot but affect our thinking. To 
the universe, one must believe, there is a 
unity. One thought is in it; one directing 



1 1 8 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

purpose. Of it, as a part, our planet must 
have been during an unimaginably long past, 
and, as would seem, must be during an unim- 
aginably long future. The widening boun- 
daries of space thus call for widening 
boundaries of time, — a thing also suggested 
by such extremely slow land-making as must 
have marked the emergence from the ocean 
of such territory as the peninsula of Florida ; 
a thing suggested by the periods of glacia- 
tion on the earth's surface ; and a thing 
suggested, also, by the obviously great an- 
tiquity of man. 

If, now, space is so great, and time so long, 
and our earth so little and yet so linked 
to the greatness and the long continuance 
of the universe, must it not be evident that 
the Bible men are speaking to us out of 
inadequate space and time categories, even 
as the Saviour warned the Apostles when he 
said, " But of that day and hour knoweth no 
one, not even the angels of heaven, neither 
the Son, but the Father only " ? Has not the 
time been long ? And will it not, by all 
universe and planet indications, be long ? 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life. 119 

And is not the plan, therefore, by so much 
the greater? And is it not as extensive as 
space, and as inclusive ? And yet wherein 
have our systems, shut into the old, imper- 
fect time and space categories, recognized 
this ? These are questions which the newer 
religious thinking, laying the world Bible 
and the pen-and-ink Bible side by side, and 
reverently scrutinizing both, cannot help 
asking. And with the ansvv'er to these 
questions much else is associated. 

2. Then, too, regarding the origin and 
unfolding of life on this planet, the newer 
religious thinking "cannot otherwise" than 
repair to the Museum of Comparative Zool- 
ogy, which its great founder, in his modesty, 
specified should not be called by his name, 
but which everybody speaks of as the Agassiz 
Museum ; and " cannot otherwise " than re- 
pair to the Peabody Museum of American 
Archaeology and Ethnology, and to like 
places, to learn how gradually, by what pro- 
gressive stages, and in what long cycles, 
animal life led the way to the life of man, 
and man, in turn, has come to be man as we 
know him to-day. 



1 20 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

Ah ! there was an evolution. It is a mere 
question of detail, relatively, what its stages 
were. Slowly, gradually, type succeeding 
type, intelligence more and more predomi- 
nating, and heart more and more interplay- 
ing with intelligence, did life come, and man 
come, and the man that now is, come to be 
what he is ; and how can we infer, off-hand, 
that the clock has struck, that we are the 
culmination of being, that other, larger life 
is not to succeed t At this great question 
the newer religious thinking dares to look. 
It places the two Books, both of God, side 
by side, — the world Book and the pen-and- 
ink Book, — and interrogates both and waits 
for light. And while it lingers thus, awe- 
struck, amidst its studies, determined to listen 
to the whole oracle, not to a part of it, it 
hears again the words, " Of that day and 
hour knoweth no one, not even the angels 
of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father 
only ; " and it hears that disciple whom Jesus 
loved chanting, in old age, as a newer world 
on this earth was in like manner confront- 
ing him, " It doth not yet appear what we 
shall be." 



Its Thotight of Nature, History, Life. 121 

3. The newer religious thinking con- 
fronts in the same spirit other aspects of 
nature, into which it is impossible now to go, 
though I cannot but refer to two of them. 

One is force, or life, or whatever it is to 
be called, — the thing alive in nature, the 
active principle, forceful in gravity, forceful 
in cohesion, forceful in capillary attraction, 
forceful in chemical affinity, forceful in elec- 
tricity, heat, and light, forceful in vegetation, 
in animal life, in brain life. What is this 
force ? What is this energy ? Is it one 
thing and the same, or is it many things t 
Has it consciousness in any sense ? By what 
medium is it directed ? Is the old category 
of law enough for it ? Has it some sort of 
volition and power of initiative ? Studies in 
energy, in force, how they stir the soul ! 
How they seem to pierce the veil and show 
us the invisible ! 

This is one direction. The other which I 
will mention is psychic energy. From this 
platform, not long since, that great psychol- 
ogist. Professor James, told us some of its 
wonders. Through what medium does it 



12 2 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

work ? By what processes ? What is mem- 
ory ? What are associations of ideas ? What 
part has heredity in it all ? The mind, con- 
sciousness, processes of thought, powers of 
inter-mental influence, — toward these, too, 
as well as toward force or energy, does the 
newer religious thinking face, Bible in hand, 
interpreting each book in the light of the 
other, and bent on hearing the whole oracle, 
the whole truth. 

I have mentioned specifically, thus far, 
certain aspects of nature only ; namely, space 
and time, the unfolding of life and of the life 
of man, and, as samples of much more, force 
or energy, and psychic energy. What is 
still further to be said relates, first, to history, 
and, after that, to life. 

4. The newer religious thinking hungers, 
then, for accurate historical knowledge ; that 
it may know how, nature-impelled, life, but 
particularly human life, has' unfolded itself. 
This, of necessity, must be a mighty com- 
mentary on nature as well as on life. And 
the newer religious thinking is well aware 
what a shock almost all historical inquiry 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life. 123 

must needs be to conventional ideas. For 
only recently has history been so studied 
as thoroughly to distinguish between the 
loose, popular, and often entirely erroneous 
form which history has taken, and the facts 
of history itself ; so that accurate historical 
knowledge must often be at variance with 
popular conceptions. On such studies the 
newer rehgious thinking waits for an ade- 
quate account of nature brought down to 
date, and particularly of man. What, it 
asks, has been the order of events, what the 
true relations of cause and effect, what the 
inherent possession of man, and whither his 
tendency } 

(a) In this inquiry — strongly suggested 
to us by the continuous historical impulse of 
the Old Testament, and by the tendency to 
historical summary in the speakers and 
writers of the New Testament — there are 
two matters of which the newer religious 
thinking takes special account; namely, the 
contributions to thousfht of the different 
peoples, and of the great spokesmen of the 
peoples. What, for instance, was it that 



124 ^^^ Newer Religious Thinking, 

inspired the great migrations coincident 
with the migration of Abraham ? What 
impelled the great Indo-European march 
from the Aryan table-lands of Central Asia, 
toward the West, until Europe was possessed 
by it, and it passed on to the New World ? 
What was it, characteristically, that Egypt 
gave to the world, that Assyria gave, that 
Palestine and Greece and Rome gave ? 
What is the Teutonic impulse, one side of 
it forceful through Anglo-Saxons, another 
through Germans? So of the Celt, the 
Slav, the Red Indian ? All these have a 
place in that revelation of God which the 
world is, and, Bible in hand, the newer reli- 
gious thinking presses these questions.^ 

(<5) But especially significant in the eyes 
of the newer religious thinking is all this, 
as expressing itself in national impulse and 
in creative literature. The Hebrews came to 
the front from a national impulse, guided 
of God. So must all nations have come 
forward. Therefore, analogously to the 

1 For something further on the subject of this paragraph 
and the next, see Appendix A. 



lis Thought of Nature, History, Life. 125 

contributions to thought which the Hebrews 
offered, though of a different importance, one 
awaits the testimony of all national impulses, 
— for instance, of that national impulse which 
found expression in the Arthur legends, and 
which Tennyson has idealized for all coming 
time. It is not true alone of men, but also 
of nations, that there is a spirit in them, 
" and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth 
them understanding." In the same spirit 
the newer religious thinking listens teach- 
ably to all truly creative literature. Homer 
can teach it; the hymn-makers of India; 
the tablets of Nineveh ; the Latin poets ; the 
cycles of the Nibelungen Lied and of King 
Arthur ; Dante and Shakespeare and Mil- 
ton, and the poets in prose and rhythm of 
our own age. In a certain quality, none of 
them touches the high-water mark of the 
great, constructive Hebrew writers, but all 
of them have a part to contribute to the 
expression, emphasis, idealization, and actu- 
alization of truth. Therefore, Bible in hand, 
the newer religious thinking addresses itself 
to these imperishable aspects of history, bent 



126 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

here, as elsewhere, on hearing the whole 
oracle and the whole truth. 

5. Finally, before life, the newer religious 
thinking, Bible in hand, sits docilely. 

There is nothing like it. One touch of it, 
as our great dramatist said of nature (using 
it in the sense of life), " makes the whole 
world kin." Life, life, life, seen in the smile 
or the tears of an infant ; seen in the laugh- 
ter and new discoveries of boys and girls ; 
seen in that strange apocalypse, the oncom- 
ing of maturity and the dawn of love in 
young men and women ; seen in maturity as 
it advances through ever fresh stages, new 
youths, as it were, till the head is white, and 
the strong limbs totter, and man goeth to his 
long home ; seen in the ever new combina- 
tions of the family, of the community, of the 
State, of the nation; seen in the movements 
of population ; seen in the controversies 
which agitate society ; seen in the mighty 
enthusiasms which ever and anon seize the 
world ; seen in the march of armies to battle, 
and in those peaceful triumphs which issue 
in international arbitrations, in peace con- 



Its Thought of Nature, History, Life. 127 

grasses, and in the great world's fairs ; seen, 
in short, on every hand, and felt in every 
heart, and only apprehended by our being 
ourselves alive, — life, life, life, this is the 
ultimate, the test, the arbiter, the luminous 
thing on this globe. 

Hence, at its feet, the newer religious think- 
ing sits, Bible in hand still, which tells of 
One who said, " I came that they may have 
life, and may have it abundantly." The 
thoughts which come rolling in upon this 
thinking it proposes to reduce to life, to test 
by life, to put to the proof in the conflict of 
life ; and, while it studies the pen-and-ink 
Bible, also to study the world Bible, in 
nature, history, life, — sure that he who was 
" the Life," and is it, wishes the whole of it 
to be apprehended, appreciated, obeyed, and 
made alive in Christly living. 

" In him was life ; and the life was the 
light of men ; " and in like manner all the 
life which he has touched and inspired — 
and his touch and inspiration are on and in 
all life — is also, in larger or smaller degree, 
the light of men. So believing, the newer 



128 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

thinking presses on in the path, the infinite 
path, stretching before it forever. Shall 
not we be of it ? Ah ! but we cannot help 
being of it ! No man can quite escape from, 
his time. No man can quite shut out the 
light of God. 



ITS IDEA OF THE BIBLE. 



SYNOPSIS. 

Phenomenal antiquity, survival, and world-affecting influ- 
ence of the Bible. — Greatly diverse, and yet a unit. — Effec- 
tiveness of its form ; its finding power. — Universality of 
its hold on men. — It is The Book. — Its influence steadily 
augmenting. — Anxiety regarding it superfluous and wasted 
(historical examples). — Reverence of the newer religious 
thinking for it. — Certain inquiries about it now much at the 
front: (i) How are the Genesis forewords to be understood? 
Ecclesiastical ill treatment of them in the past ; also in the 
present ; why the belief is growing that the forewords are a 
poetic treatment, inspired, and for moral and spiritual ends, 
of matter derived from a common stock of ancient tradition. 
(2) Was the order of Israel's life from priests to prophets, 
or vice versa f Why belief is tending in the latter direction, 
with the recognition of needful consequent re-arrangement 
of historical details. (3) The New Testament documents 
largely original and nearly contemporaneous. But: {a) Not 
enough allowance is ordinarily made for the immediate use 
for which they were intended ; also {b) Should they prove 
less largely original and less nearly contemporaneous, their 
power for moral and spiritual helpfulness would not be 
impaired thereby. — The Bible bound hand and foot in the 
past in certain respects, and needing deliverance. — Its free 
investigation imperative, and conducive to its highest useful- 
ness. — The book is from God ; its .light and warmth are 
eternal. 



V. 

ITS IDEA OF THE BIBLE.i 

Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for 
teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction 
which is in righteousness : that the man of God 
may be complete, furnished completely unto every good 
work. — 2 Timothy iii. i6, 17. 

nPHERE is a book containing fragments 
of literature probably older than any 
other literature ; a book, in itself and as a 
whole, among the oldest of books ; a book 
preserved with a care so scrupulous that the 
variations in its exceedingly ancient manu- 
scripts, though numerous in minor respects, 
are far fewer than in any other ancient 
writing of like extent and often transcribed; 
a book regarded for many ages as sacred ; a 
book the embodiment of that wonderful 
religious life which marked the Hebrew 
people, — the embodiment of that thinking 

^ Prospect Street, Sunday night, December 4, 1892. 



132 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

and history which, in the fulness of time, 
made a sharp break with the Hebrews, and 
which retaining what was germinal in the 
Israelitish religion suddenly emancipated 
the same from narrowing Hebrew bounds, 
enriched it marvellously, and gave it, with 
exulting joy, to become the possession of 
all mankind. 

This book had a most diverse authorship, 
some twoscore hands at least appearing in 
it. It sprang likewise out of many ages, 
and out of vastly different environments 
and thought-currents. Much of its upspring- 
ing, moreover, was out of heated conflicts 
of opinion, when, from time to time through 
ages, the old was dying, and the new was 
struggling to be born. There were great 
diversities of specific purpose for which 
its different parts were respectively com- 
posed. And yet its many hands, its varied 
settings and varied age-niarks, the succes- 
sive intellectual and spiritual conflicts out 
of which it sprang, and the diversities of 
specific purpose for which its parts were 
written, — all these have not caused in it 



Its Idea of the Bible, 133 

confusion, but rather unity, as if still, in dif- 
ferent aspects, one and the same thought, 
purpose, inspiration, was getting for itself 
expression. 

Thus wonderfully a unit, it is nevertheless 
literature multiform, — history, biography, 
poetry, parable, philosophy, proverb, law, 
maxim, and much besides. As regards finish, 
it is not, in most parts, elaborated to the 
degree which some literature exhibits ; but 
the plainness, directness, and simplicity 
gained thereby more than offset any loss 
in literary form, while it contains many 
passages as exquisite in this respect as 
anything even in the Greek tongue. It is 
strangely able, out of these characteristics, 
to find its reader, to touch his heart, to stir 
his mind and conscience, to illumine his 
understanding, and to make him truly wise. 
Hereby it has entered into the lives of whole 
peoples, has moulded them, swayed them, 
and given them laws, liberty, and spiritual 
momentum. 

It has, moreover, been able to affect equally 
all classes and types of men, — the doubter 



1 34 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

and the man of intense faith ; the man coldly 
intellectual and the man of great heart fer- 
vors ; the cultivated and the illiterate ; the vile 
and sinning and the pure and holy ; great 
patriots and great scientists ; great statesmen 
and great inventors and discoverers ; women 
equally with men ; the aged equally with 
little children ; those marching into the 
leaden hail of battle and those studying in 
the quiet cloisters of universities ; those keep- 
ing step to marriage music and those bearing 
the dead to their last home. It has been 
a comfort alike to sovereigns and to slaves, 
in palaces and in prisons, to laborers and to 
the luxurious, to those toiling, sorrowing, 
despairing, and to those hoping, thriving, 
successful, — in short, to every human being 
whom, in whatsoever circumstances, it has 
reached, and who would let it reach him. 

For reasons such as the foregoing, it is 
The Book, and accordingly it has come 
about that it bears the name for " book " in 
the Greek tongue, with the definite article 
prefixed, and is called, in our dear English 
speech, with almost the letters corresponding 
to those in Greek, The Bible. 



Its Idea of the Bible. 135 

Nor is the power of this book waning. 
It is rather steadily augmenting, as it is 
more and more spread abroad, more and more 
freed from misconceptions, and better and 
better understood. Its force is moral, and, 
as the moral sense is developing, it is more 
and more finding m^en. It was never read 
by so many people as are reading it to-day, 
and never was bearing fruit in so many lives 
as it is bearing fruit in to-day. 

Anxiety is often expressed for its future. 
Never was anxiety more utterly superfluous 
and wasted. The Bible has survived crises 
to which, at present, there is no parallel. 
It has been almost destroyed from the earth 
literally, more than once, as, for example, in 
Josiah's time. It has been buried in inade- 
quate translations, for example, the Latin 
Vulgate, for centuries. It has repeatedly 
been hid from the common people, as during 
the Dark Ages. It has been loaded down 
with paraphrases and commentaries in past 
times to an extent which nearly extinguished 
the book itself. It has been embarrassed by 
good men's making claims for it which it 



136 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

never makes for itself, and by suffering 
attacks upon it in consequence, for the mak- 
ing of which there was no just ground. But 
it lives. Its influence is steadily widening 
and deepening. It does not need any of our 
anxiety; it is abundantly able to take care 
of itself. 

The newer religious thinking responds to 
all this. It reverences the Bible. Those men 
outside the lines which include you and me, 
the men who would call themselves of unfaith 
and of no faith, freely and often express their 
great regard for it, and, in their way, bear 
testimony to its benign influence upon them. 
So of the so-called " Unevangelicals." So 
of the men outside the boundaries of Prot- 
estantism. Men of these different classes, 
as I pointed out in the first of these dis- 
courses, are themselves also in a newer 
religious thinking ; and their types of such 
thinking are steadily making, in their respec- 
tive manners, more, not less, of the Bible. 
Of the newer religious thinking within so- 
called " evangelical " lines, in its manner also, 
the same is true. The Bible was never so 



Its Idea of the Bible. 137 

much to its men as now. It was never 
so much to me as now. 

From this preliminary statement, I ask 
you to pass to the consideration of two 
points : first, certain inquiries about the 
Bible now much at the front ; and, secondly, 
the sense in which, to the newer religious 
thinking, the Bible is so much ; yes, more 
even than ever before. And, — 

I. Certain inquiries about the Bible now 
much at the front. 

I. The first of these is about the prole- 
gomena, or forewords, of the Bible ; those 
sententious, wonderful passages which brood 
for us amidst the beginnings of things, and 
afford us a tender, simple, luminous setting 
for all that follows after them. How impor- 
tant, for comprehensiveness, background, and 
symmetry, it is, that the Bible should get 
some such introduction to its readers, it is 
easy to see. The question is, How are we 
to understand these forewords, — Creation, 
Man and Woman, Eden, The First Sin, The 
First Murder, The First Civilization, The 
Flood, The Origin of Diversity in Lan- 
guages, etc. } 



138 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

But, first, let it be premised that, among 
other ill treatments of the Bible, there has 
been one centring at these very forewords, 
which the newer religious thinking can never 
forget. The study of astronomy was long 
hampered by the old Church interpretation 
of these passages. This was why Copernicus 
delayed the publication of his astronomy 
until he was about to die, and why Galileo 
was persecuted for affirming planetary revo- 
lutions. Similarly, within years more recent, 
the studies, first of geology, and then of 
glaciation (so recently as the lifetime of 
Agassiz), have been hindered by the same 
understanding of these passages. The earth, 
it was claimed, could not have been strati- 
fied by the causes which geology affirmed, 
because the six days of creation gave no time 
therefor ; and glacial epochs were alleged to 
have been superfluous, because the Flood 
took care of all that. But Copernicus and 
Galileo, and Kepler and Newton, had their 
way ; and then the great geologists had 
theirs ; and the utterly unwarrantable claims 
which holy men had put forth for the Bible 



Its Idea of the Bible, 1 39 

had to be withdrawn, after all the hard 
words, and the trembling of devout souls, 
and the humiliating position for a great, 
comprehensive book like the Bible to be put 
in, — namely, the position of defence. 

And while the newer religious thinking 
is recalling this, it sees before its eyes the 
present prodigious studies in zoology, in 
ethnology, and in the gradual unfolding of the 
race of man on this planet, — studies more 
recent than those to which I have referred 
in astronomy, in geology, and in glaciation, 
which raised such a hue and cry, and against 
which Scripture texts were hurled ; but 
studies pursuing those same slow, plodding 
methods of induction by which we came to 
our present views of astronomy, geology, and 
glaciation ; and as seemingly likely to prove 
true as they proved true. And here again 
the newer religious thinking sees the Bible 
put in the same false and humiliating posi- 
tion, of trying to conquer Darwin by proof- 
texts, and the godly McCosh by creed-bound 
professors of Hebrew. 

Another fact under the eye of the newer 



1 40 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

religious thinking is the Hebrew itself, and 
its cognate languages ; and what the monu- 
ments of Egypt and of Assyria, with a great 
variety of other ancient memorials, have to 
tell us. From these and other studies it 
appears that counterparts of these forewords 
of the Bible were numerous in the early 
ages, and in a great variety of forms, — Crea- 
tion, and The Flood, for example. Almost 
every ancient people had accounts like these, 
but with diversified details. Which were 
original ? Did the Bible borrow from them ? 
Did they borrow from the Bible } Or did 
they and the Bible alike draw from a com- 
mon store of tradition in the possession of 
antiquity '^, Of these three suppositions the 
last — namely, that the Hebrew writers drew, 
as did the writers of other nations, from a 
general and common store of tradition — 
seems to many in the newer religious think- 
ing as the most probable. 

Moreover, a comparison of the Hebrew 
treatment of a particular tradition, and the 
treatment of the same tradition by the 
writers of other peoples, reveals the fact that. 



Its Idea of the Bible, 141 

in each instance, the Hebrew treatment 
differs from the rest in the accentuation of 
the moral aspect of the story. For instance, 
in the very common story of The Fratricide, 
the other writers make a hero of him, or 
even a demigod ; but the Hebrew account, 
while indicating his city-building, etc., points 
out the shame and crime of his bloody deed, 
— the mark of Cain. These comparisons, 
together with the seemingly conclusive infer- 
ence that the Hebrew and the other writers 
were not drawing, the one from the other, 
but all from a common store of tradition, 
lead naturally to the inference that these 
Bible forewords, instead of being historical 
and literal accounts of the First Things, were 
the attempt of holy men of God, " moved by 
the Holy Ghost," to redeem the common, 
and often gross and impure, traditions of 
early antiquity, from such grossness and 
impurity, and to make them vehicles for 
conveying moral and spiritual truth. 

This inference becomes almost impera- 
tive in the attempt of these writers to handle 
the old traditions about the illicit marriages 



142 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

of demigods to women. This was the com- 
mon ancient belief. The Hebrew writers 
on the ancient beliefs could not bring them- 
selves to look at such marriages as anything 
other than in the highest degree immoral, 
and yet could not prevent the wide credence 
of these celestial-earthly unions. What, then, 
did they ? They took, very wisely, the old 
stories and wrought from them that myste- 
rious narrative in the first eight verses of the 
sixth of Genesis, where, as they taught, such 
conduct was so abhorrent to the God of the 
Hebrews that he repented himself that he 
had made man upon the earth, and was 
moved thereby to bring on the Flood. How 
natural, reasonable, and morally tonic it thus 
is to see the whole cycle of such tales on the 
part of the Jupiters of the skies, and the mis- 
guided fair ones of earth, dismissed in eight 
solemn verses, not attempting to controvert 
the common stories, — an attempt which could 
not then have been successful, — but brand- 
ing them as abhorrent to Deity, as causing 
him to say, " My Spirit shall not always 
strive with man," as making him repent that 



Its Idea of the Bible. 143 

he had created man at all, and as issuing in 
the Flood ! 

The newer religious thinking, then, while 
its representatives by no means concur on 
this subject, and particularly in matters of 
detail, is greatly inclined, nevertheless, — 
(i) in view of the great mass of such matter 
in the early traditions of our race ; (2) in view 
of the improbability, either that the Bible 
narrative was what the traditions sprang 
from, or that the Bible narrative sprang from 
particular versions of the traditions ; and 
(3) in view of the method of treatment in 
the Bible writers, as for moral and spiritual 
ends, — is greatly inclined, I say, to believe 
that these Bible forewords, instead of being 
historical and literal in the sense of annals, 
are spiritual and moral, like poems. Similar, 
though in a far less important connection, 
is the treatment by which the more or less 
gross matter in the Arthur legends has 
been purified, and made didactic of moral 
and spiritual truth, in Tennyson's " Idyls of 
the King." 

If this supposition is correct, not only 



144 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

may Copernicus and Galileo, and Lyell and 
Agassiz, go on with their astronomy, geol- 
ogy, and glaciation, but Darwin and John 
Fiske may go on with their studies in and 
philosophizings concerning the origin of 
man, unmolested. A simple, noble, spiritual 
account is given, and purpose shown, in these 
forewords ; they make a natural introduc- 
tion, poem-wise, to the history which succeeds 
them ; and holy men of God are still speak- 
ing as they are " moved by the Holy Ghost," 
"for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for 
instruction which is in righteousness." 

2. There is another question now much 
at the front. It, and the inquiry about the 
forewords, are the primary Old Testament 
questions. It is much the more complicated 
of the two. But the same simple principle 
of growing life seems to underlie it. Ah ! 
life is such a touchstone ! The question to 
which I allude is this : Which was prior in 
the order of time in the life of Israel, the 
priestly and legal impulse, as has been the 
traditional view, or the prophetical ? 

According to almost all historical analo- 



Its Idea of the Bible. 145 

gies, the religious life of nations is marked, 
first, by mighty moral and spiritual impulses, 
and then by their taking form in law and 
ritual. But the Old Testament, in the order 
of its present arrangement, reverses this pro- 
cess. There is, first, very elaborate law and 
ritual, and then a passing from these to the 
true inspirers of a people, their prophets and 
psalmists. 

Moreover, enough is now known about 
the origin of religions ; and, in particular, 
enough is now known about the great Semitic 
life of which the life of Israel was the most 
conspicuous part, as well as about the life 
of Israel itself, — to render it, inductively, 
highly probable that the order was from spirit- 
ual impulse in men like Abraham, Moses, 
Samuel, and David, to ritual and legal form, 
from about the general period of Ezra, 
though having its beginnings much earlier, 
— a view of the case with which the fearful 
development of the formal and legal spirit 
among the Jews in our Saviour's time seems 
to agree. 

This general probability in the case — 



146 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

namely, that spirit would precede form, and 
that the mighty spiritual impulse would pre- 
cede the elaborations of ritual and law, in the 
shape in which we now have them — is 
vastly augmented by the relief which such a 
view at once brings to difficulties that are 
constantly coming up on the ordinary view. 
For instance, there had been, we are told, no 
such Passover as Josiah's since the days of 
the Judges. But why not, if this was the 
formal law for all the years intervening? 
Again, Samuel, not a priest, probably not 
even a Levite, offered sacrifices. Why did 
he do that, if the formal law as we have it, 
which assigned that duty to the priestly class, 
was then in existence ? So, too, numerous 
reformations in the history of Israel throw 
up items of detail which are most explicable 
on the contrary supposition. 

I am aware that efforts are made, by one 
method or another, to explain away all these 
difficulties, in order to maintain that view 
which is traditional, and which the surface 
of the Old Testament seems to justify. 
But the attempt reminds one of the cycles 



Its Idea of the Bible, 147 

and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy, by 
which, on the supposition that the heavenly 
bodies revolved in a hollow sphere around 
the earth, it was sought to explain the diffi- 
culties in the way of this view occasioned 
by the seemingly irregular and arbitrary 
movements of the planets. The moment the 
Copernican astronomy came in, the cycles 
and epicycles vanished ; the planets were 
seen to revolve, not in peculiar but in normal 
orbits ; and a whole system of irregularities, 
until that time ingeniously and variously 
explained, became no longer irregular, but 
parts of one vast, simple, and comprehensive 
working of astronomical principles. 

So of the seeming anachronisms and arti- 
ficialities of the life of Israel. They are 
capable, indeed, of a great variety of inge- 
nious explanations; but first become entirely 
thinkable if the writings, as now collected, 
were, by holy men of God " moved by the 
Holy Ghost," from time to time rewritten, or 
re-edited and elaborated, out of a yearning 
and burning passion to adapt them to the 
successive needs and exigencies of the moral 
and spiritual life of Israel. 



148 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

There would be nothing dishonest, neces- 
sarily, in such a course. The people who 
first heard or read the writings in their 
newer form would understand it, as we under- 
stand a poem or a sermon now, and as a 
similar treatment of the forewords was 
probably understood. So far as there were 
fictions in the process, they would either 
be legal fictions, like many in constant use 
to-day, which are neither deceits nor are 
capable of deceiving anybody ; or they would 
be the analogues of certain writings in the 
earlier history of Christianity, put forth by 
men sincerely seeking to serve God, and that^ 
too, not under Old Testament, but under 
New Testament light. 

Such a course would also be true to that 
law of spiritual life by which knowledge and 
growth in things spiritual ensue upon effort, 
and especially effort for others. The disci- 
ples who go out to teach in the Saviour's 
name and to do helpful works, learn and 
grow as they cannot even by staying with 
him. He wisely tells them relatively little, 
and leaves some of the greatest apostolic les- 



Its Idea of the Bible. 149 

sons to be learned in the stress of later work, 
as Saint Peter's at Joppa, and Saint Paul's 
in the obscure years in Arabia and Cilicia, 
and in the failure at Athens which prepared 
the way for the success at Corinth. 

Such a course is called for, as I have 
intimated, by any quantity of phenomena 
brought to light in a critical study of the 
Old Testament. They seem to compel the 
conclusion that its present state is that into 
which it was gradually brought through suc- 
cessive attempts of holy and inspired men to 
adapt its matter to current national needs. 

What suffers, if this conclusion stands? 
Nothing, except our preconceived notion of 
how the Old Testament came into existence ; 
a notion which the Old Testament nowhere 
affirms. 

What gains ensue, if this conclusion 
stands ? A general induction is confirmed. 
Difficulties, met as it were by interminable 
Ptolemaic epicycles, vanish. The growth of 
the Old Testament becomes reasonable, like 
apostolic growth. No essential fiction is in 
the process, but life, warm and unmistakable. 



150 The Newer Religious Thi7iking. 

We have first spirit, then form ; in short, 
correspondence to the well-nigh universal law 
of national and religious unfolding, — this 
whole vast matter becoming thus amenable 
to the operations and reign of spiritual law, 
instead of their inversion. 

Here again the representatives of the 
newer religious thinking are not altogether 
concurrent, and particularly in matters of 
detail. They are, however, moving in this 
direction. They incline to the belief that the 
life of Israel, as it appears on the surface of 
the Old Testament, needs re-arranging to 
agree with facts now ascertained, and in 
accordance with the laws of spiritual life.^ 

3. Coming to the New Testament, those 
of you who have perhaps been demurring at 
what I have said about the Old, will be glad 

* " Needs re-arranging." Not the Old Testament. That 
is inspired literature, and should remain substantially as it is. 
Some editions, however, as is beginning to be done, should 
be so printed as to exhibit the real order of the writings, 
and, in the case of those books which are composite, the 
respective elements entering into them, so far as they can 
be ascertained. " The life of Israel," the rather, " needs 
re-arranging." That is, it needs to be written, studied, and 
thought of in its real, rather than in its apparent, order. 



Its Idea of the Bible. 151 

to hear me say that prodigious critical 
studies, relatively new in the Old Testament, 
have been concentrated on the New for 
nearly a century, with the result mainly to 
confirm the historical and detailed accuracy 
of the New Testament writings. That is to 
say, these writings are largely original, and 
nearly contemporaneous. I say, " mainly to 
confirm;" for there are points on which the 
liighest scholarship still hesitates. 

The general result here indicated was to 
have been expected. For the years covered 
by the New Testament story were relatively 
few ; the events occurred at the blazing fore- 
front of history ; they occurred in what was 
itself a not altogether uncritical age ; and 
they immediately, as narrated in the New 
Testament documents, fell into the hands of 
the great scholars of the second and third 
Christian centuries, who must have verified 
them in greater or less degree. On this part 
of the subject there are only two remarks 
which I desire to make. 

(a) The first is, that, while we prob- 
ably have in the New Testament either 



152 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

documents in substantially their original 
form, or documents which for substance 
reproduce original matter, so that, speak- 
ing critically, we are treading on somewhat 
solid ground, we have never enough allowed, 
on the other hand, for what the Apostle Paul 
asserts in the text, and implies elsewhere, to 
have been the purpose of these writings ; 
namely, immediate usefulness. 

The Apostle expects the world soon to 
end. He is writing hurried letters to his 
convert churches. He so writes as to go 
back and correct himself without erasure, as 
in the matter of the persons he baptized at 
Corinth. He expressly says, in one instance, 
that he is using his own judgment about a 
particular case, and thinks he has the mind 
of Christ.^ In short, the writing is not for 

1 For a brief, clear, and searching exposition of difficulties 
attending our traditional approach to the Bible, written by a 
rare scholar and a rare Christian, see "The Change of Atti- 
tude towards the Bible," by Prof. Joseph Henry Thayer, 
D.D. Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, Boston. 1891. 

For an excellent discussion, in some detail, of this whole 
general subject, see (same publishers and year) Dr. Wash- 
ington Gladden's " Who Wrote the Bible ? A Book for the 
People." 



Its Idea of the Bible. 153 

abstract and scientific purposes, but for imme- 
diate and practical use, "that the man of 
God may be . . . furnished completely unto 
every good work." He also speaks of his 
own limitations of knowledge, knowing, as 
he says, in part, and prophesying in part. 

All this suggests to us, what Christ says, 
that the words he speaks are "spirit and 
life." Are they not, then, to be taken in 
their spirit and life, for constructive moral 
purposes, rather than as arbitrary and hard 
and fast proof-texts } 

(b) My second remark is that if the criti- 
cal studies of nearly a century had turned 
out the other way, or, by the arrival of fresh 
historical light, should turn out the other 
way; that is to say, if it had turned out, or 
should turn out, that these precious docu- 
ments belonged to the second century, or the 
third, rather than the first, the same rewrit- 
ing and readjustment to the new needs of 
the Church taking place, as would seem to 
have taken place in the Old Testament, — 
if, I say, this had been proved (as has not 
been the case), or if it should be proved in 



154 ^'^^ Newer Religious Thinking, 

the larger light of the future (which seems 
hardly likely), still this discovery would not 
invalidate the New Testament documents 
in the matter of their appropriate moral and 
spiritual teaching, any more than those of 
the Old Testament on the corresponding 
supposition. 

These writings, in any case, breathe a 
lofty moral and spiritual life, and that life 
begets life in men. " The letter killeth, but 
the spirit giveth life." That spirit, in any 
event, the New Testament contains to an 
unequalled degree. And so long as men 
shall continue to hunger after and be impres- 
sible by such a spirit, the New Testament 
will retain its peerless authority over life. 
It is not authoritative because certain theo- 
logical claims can be substantiated for it. 
As they have all come, so it would matter 
little if they should all go. It is authorita- 
tive, rather, because it has succeeded, as no 
other literature, in commanding the spirits 
of men. 

II. We now come, in closing, to the sec- 
ond division of the subject, namely : The 



Its Idea of the Bible. 1 5 5 

sense in which, to the newer religious think- 
ing, the Bible is so much ; yes, more even 
than ever before. 

The Bible has been bound hand and foot, 
for several centuries, by what is a compara- 
tively modern doctrine, namely, that of the 
literal and verbal inspiration of Scripture. I 
say this is a comparatively modern doctrine, 
for the apostles quoted the Old Testament 
loosely, as they could hardly have done, had 
they regarded its very letters as inspired. 
They themselves, also, wrote as I have 
described, which they could hardly have 
done, had they thought of the letters of the 
alphabet, and the phraseology which they 
used, as inspired. Moreover, the writers of 
the early Church quoted with the same loose- 
ness, and, like the apostles, were driving at 
the point, not the words. 

By this doctrine, — comparatively modern, 
because unknown to the apostles and their 
immediate successors, — the doctrine, namely, 
of literal and verbal inspiration, the Bible 
has long been hampered and mistreated. 
It was set up to fight Copernicus and Gali- 



156 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

leo ; later, to fight Lyell and Agassiz ; at 
length, to fight Darwin and John Fiske. 
These positions into which, entirely with- 
out warrant, it has thus been forced, have 
proved, unless we except the last, — and 
probably the substance of that should be 
included, — utterly untenable. Similarly, 
under this same theory of literal and verbal 
inspiration, it has been set up to fight, with 
proof-texts, nearly every advance in a pro- 
founder, simpler, truer thought of God, 
which has been suggested since Anselm in 
the eleventh century, — positions which, in 
most instances, as in the matter of astron- 
omy, of geology, and of glaciation, have 
likewise proved untenable. 

Now the newer religious thinking does not 
want the Bible to be subjected any longer 
to such humiliating work. It is good for 
something better than the fighting of need- 
less and losing battles. It is inspired, the 
newer religious thinking believes, in a far 
nobler way, namely, in spirit rather than 
in letter. It is inspired for ends spiritual, 
moral, and practical. Holy men of God, 



Its Idea of the Bible, 1 5 7 

"moved by the Holy Ghost," spake in it "for 
teaching, for reproof, for correction," and 
"for instruction which is in righteousness." 
In the matter of its forewords, of the order 
of unfolding in the life of Israel, and of the 
New Testament documents, — in fact, in 
every respect, — it should be subjected to 
the same criticism, the same research, and 
the same interpretation as any literature. 

So the newer religious thinking believes, 
and of this it is not afraid. It welcomes all 
new light. Just as the new astronomy and 
the new geology have vastly expanded and 
illuminated the human mind, so, as these 
studies advance, it anticipates that the new 
understanding of history, and the true ap- 
prehension of the order and meaning of 
the Bible documents, will vastly expand 
and illuminate the human soul. When the 
Bible is thus freed, when it is stripped of a 
false mediaeval authority and clad in its own 
pristine authority of spirit and life, it be- 
comes, more even than ever, a new and life- 
giving book. 

And that it is an inspired book, — inspired 



158 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

by the same Spirit which has inspired all 
other literature, and has inspired you and 
me, but inspired in a more conspicuous and 
life-giving degree than is ordinarily the case 
with literary or individual inspiration, — the 
newer religious thinking fully believes. The 
book is from God. Its light and warmth are 
eternal. Side by side it stands with that 
other book, of nature, history, life, of which I 
spoke last Sunday night. Each throws light 
on the other. Each supplements the other. 
Between them, rightly interpreted, there is 
no schism. Their truth is one. And that 
truth, it is given you and me reverently to 
seek after, to receive into our hearts, and to 
make the lamp of our feet, and the light of 
our path. 



CHRIST ITS CENTRE. 



SYNOPSIS. 

Importance of indicating the fact of the newer relig- 
ious thinking. — Obedience unto the heavenly vision its 
foremost trait. — Its other characteristics have underlying 
them the principle of a thoroughly enlisted intellect, as well 
as of a thoroughly stirred heart ; the appeal, in short, is to 
the whole man. — This true even of the practical bent of the 
newer religious thinking (illustrations). — Hunger after God 
and passion for men its inspirations ; their fine reciprocal re- 
lation ; their image-breaking but pacific purpose: — The 
world Book and the pen-and-ink Book its material to work 
in and grow by ; this the highest appHcation of the inductive 
method ; it constitutes an epoch in religion. — Christ its 
centre : (i) For men outside the faith ; in what sense ; 
(2) For " Unevangelicals ; " two illustrations ; (3) For conser- 
vative " Evangelicals " (examples) ; (4) For hberal " Evan- 
gelicals " (examples). — The law of eternal sacrifice. — This 
the true Ifi hoc signo vinces. — This is not getting salvation, 
but salvation getting us ; this is not gaining heaven, but 
heaven gaining us. — This the divine handwriting on the 
newer religious thinking. — There is only one thing for you 
and me to do, namely, to throw ourselves into this infinite 
Christ principle. 



VI. 

CHRIST ITS CENTRE.i 

WhOf being in the form of God, counted it not a prize 
to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, 
taking the form of a se? vant, being made in the like- 
ness of 7nen ; and being found in fashion as a man, he 
hmnbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, 
yea, the death of the ci'oss. Wherefore also God highly 
exalted him, and gave unto him the naine which is 
above every name ; that in the na7ne of Jesus every 
knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on 
earth and things under the earth, and that every 
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the 
glory of God the Father. — Philippians ii. 6-11. 

T UNDERTOOK, in the first of these dis- 
courses, to indicate the fact of a newer 
religious thinking, and to characterize that 
thinking. 

It is important to indicate the fact, — not 
unduly, not out of proportion, especially not 

1 Prospect Street, Sunday night, December 18, 1892. 
Down to the paragraph beginning, "It is to this point, then, 
that we now come," on page 171, I have substituted a differ- 



1 62 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

in neglect of much else of large importance, 
and, particularly, not in neglect of simple, 
every-day duty, thought, and devotion. But, 
assuming that due proportion is maintained, 
this great, present-day fact needs making 
known. The ostrich, hiding her head in the 
sand upon the approach of peril, is not a wise 
bird. Neither, unless in appearance, is that 
bird wise which, when all the woodland is 
carolling the glory and joy of the dawn, hides 
from it in some cleft of tree or of rock. To 
know one's time, to apprehend its perils and 
possibilities, to feel wdth quick and tender 
sympathy the heart-throb of its great aspira- 
tions and inspirations, — this is to live. Its 
contrary is to fall under our Saviour's sur- 
prised and pained rebuke, " Ye cannot dis- 
cern the signs of the times." 

In characterizing the newer religious 
thinking I spoke of its spring in " heavenly 
vision," and its obedience thereto. That is 

ent opening of the discourse from that used in preaching it. 
I have also permitted myself an anachronism of two days in 
the illustration taken from my own parish on pages 165 and 
166. For the original opening, with the reasons for the 
transposition, see Appendix B. 



Christ its Centre, 163 

its most important trait. No prophet of old 
was ever more truly moved of God than the 
best spirit in this thinking. And the very 
obloquy which it is sure to encounter, chas- 
tens and makes higher than of this earth 
the holy resolution with which it presses for- 
ward. I can only repeat what I stated as I 
drew attention to the point : *' Let no man 
say, or even imagine, that this thinking is 
other than inspired by, and obedient unto, a 
' heavenly vision,' which ever hovers in its 
foreground, and beckons it on." 

The other characteristics which I named 
were : " its scientific temper ; " " its practi- 
cal bent;" and "its purpose to include in its 
concept the entire religious impulse of the 
world." 

One principle underlies all these. It is 
the principle of a thoroughly enlisted intel- 
lect, as well as of a thoroughly stirred heart. 
This is the glory of the religion of the new 
time. It appeals to the whole man. There 
is no servility of a half or two thirds of the 
man to the other half or third. 

Take, for example, what might seem an 



164 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

exception to this, namely, the "practical 
bent " of the newer thinking. One might 
point, with this in mind, sneeringly at the 
thinking, and say, " It may do for professors 
and essay-preachers, but practical men don't 
care for it." But he would have reflected 
little who should so employ this trait. The 
fact is that many of the most practical Chris- 
tians, to-day, are practical, as a sheer intel- 
lectual necessity. They cannot abide the 
idols still standing upright in the imagery 
chambers of traditional theology. Neither, 
on the other hand, can they give up their 
hold on God. Therefore they turn, almost 
desperately, to work. Here they will find, 
they are sure, light. " If any man willeth 
to do his will," they console themselves, " he 
shall know of the teaching." I adduce two 
illustrations of this. 

When the profoundest theologian of our 
century, Maurice, was spending his days and 
nights for the London workingmen, and 
in that work discovered Charles Kingsley, 
Thomas Hughes, and many another, it was 
the intellectual necessity of something prac- 



Christ its Centre, 165 

tical, not less than sympathy for the men 
needing help, which became the key to that 
remarkable chapter in our century's history. 
This, and, so far as we can see, this alone, 
gave Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes 
not only to literature, but also to the intel- 
lectual enrichment of our century's religious 
life. 

But to come nearer home. There listened 
eagerly to the earlier of these discourses a 
physician, second to few in this Common- 
wealth as a general practitioner, who, the 
last two nights he was out, spent them devis- 
ing ways for increasing the practical efficiency 
of this church; who, with pneumonia upon 
him, answered, nevertheless, a night call the 
second of those nights, and desired to start 
out in the morning ; and who, ten days there- 
after, was with the great Physician. His 
hands and his heart were ever full of all sorts 
of practical helpfulness to men. And his 
last testimony in our meetings was in a vein 
of rejoicing that creed-wars were waning, and 
that the Christian Church was getting to 
work. And what was he 1 A man of deep- 



1 66 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

est, tenderest sympathies ? Yes ; but also 
a man of doubts, questionings, perplexities, 
who at once conquered them, used them, 
and became a humble servant of the Lord 
Jesus through practical work.^ 

The practical bent, then, as well as the 
scientific temper, and the purpose to com- 
prehend and utilize the truer impulses of all 
religions, noticeable as traits of the newer 
religious thinking, indicate, all of them, as 
I said, the thoroughly enlisted intellect, as 
well as the thoroughly stirred heart. The 
whole man, in short, is coming to the front 
in religion. Is not this significant? Does it 
not betoken a new time ? Ought it not to 
make our hearts sing? 

But the measure of a movement is in its 
inspirations. We saw the fact and some 
traits of the newer religious thinking in the 
first discourse. It was in the second and 
third that we saw what its inspirations are. 
They are the highest, the noblest, — hunger 
after God, and passion for men. Not since 

^ Dea. David Marks Edgerly, M. D., truly a " beloved phy- 
sician." Born, August II, 1839; died, December 20, 1892. 



Christ its Centre, 167 

Christ was in the flesh has a movement in 
religious thought been more thoroughly im- 
bued with either of these impulses ; and the 
most blessed aspect of the present move- 
ment is that they are in such fine balance, 
each equally present, and each giving sym- 
metry and glory to the other. 

We saw, also, how these impulses lead 
inevitably to a certain image-breaking, in 
Godward and manward theology not only, 
but also in the life of society. For the " stone 
cut out of the mountain without hands " is 
to " break in pieces and consume " not only 
the image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, but 
all images. It has not come " to send peace, 
but a sword." It ought not, however, to be 
thought of as a conquest, but as, the rather, 
a measureless love, with its end peace. 
Happy will it be for us if we shall capitu- 
late with it early. 

Having these noble and so reciprocal in- 
spirations, and this at once destructive and 
constructive work in hand, has the newer 
religious thinking adequate material to work 
in and grow by, or is it a kind of wild pas- 



1 68 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

sion of the age, like the crusades, which 
were utterly barren, except in their indirect 
results ? You remember how the wise Ar- 
thur deprecated for most of his knights the 
quest of the Holy Grail : — 

" Go, since your vows are sacred, being made : 
Yet — for ye know the cries of all my realm 
Pass through this hall — how often, O my knights, 
Your places being vacant at my side, 
This chance of noble deeds will come and go 
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires 
Lost in the quagmire ! Many of you, yea most. 
Return no more." 

Is the newer religious thinking such a quest, 
or has it adequate material to work in and 
grow by ? 

The fourth and fifth discourses afforded 
us the answer to this most serious question. 
We saw that the unique distinction of the 
newer religious thinking of the present is its 
being set to read two books, not one ; to listen 
to the whole oracle, not to a part of it. 
Whereas, before, mainly only one book has 
been read, and only one philosophical method 
followed, namely, deduction, we saw that in- 



Christ its Centre, 169 

duction is now to take its appropriate place 
along with deduction in the work of this 
thinking, and that that other God's Book, 
nature, history, life, or, in one word, the 
world, is now to be laid side by side with the 
pen-and-ink Book, the Bible, and each made 
to interpret the other. 

This change in philosophical method ; 
this recognition of the larger handwriting 
of God, — 

" And Nature, the old nurse, took 
The child upon her knee. 
Saying : ' Here is a story-book 
Thy Father has written for thee.' 

" ' Come, wander with me,' she said, 
* Into regions yet untrod ; 
And read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God ; ' " 1 

this sublime purpose to find God in his 
whole universe, and to let him speak to men 
out of his whole universe ; and this arduous 
task of rethinking everything into the larger 
terms of God as so manifested, — constitute 
an epoch in religion not less momentous 

^ Longfellow, " The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz." 



1 70 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

than was constituted for science when it 
gave itself to the Baconian method. In fact 
it is that method, given its highest applica- 
tion. The other method in religion, in point 
of fact, was too often only a kind of quest 
of the Holy Grail, following " wandering fires 
lost in the quagmire." Employing this better 
method the quest is becoming substantial and 
real, with promise of results more reasonable 
and permanent. 

Thus, from the indicating and character- 
izing, through the splendid inspirations and 
tasks, and then through the new and mag- 
nificent material and method, we are come, 
for the newer religious thinking, to this 
crucial inquiry : What is its centre ? Indeed, 
has it a centre ? Is there any Arthur, in his 
Hall of Camelot^ (for this seems the mean- 

1 This was how Camelot looked as men approached it, 
eluding and yet winning them, and drawing them within 
itself: — 

" Far off they saw the silver-misty morn 
Rolling her smoke about the Royal mount, 
That rose between the forest and the field. 
At times the summit of the high city flashed ; 
At times the spires and turrets half-way down 
Pricked through the mist ; at times the great gate shone 
Only, that opened on the field below : . . . 
And there was no gate like it under heaven." 



Christ its Centre, 171 

ing of the " Idyls "), for it ever to come back 
to, and ever to start out afresh from, and 
ever to live under the vow of? 

Blessed be God, there is ! It is that mys- 
terious Person, of whom the mystery of 
Arthur's " Coming," and " Passing," and 
wondrous defeated and yet triumphing life, 
seems to be speaking to us. And we grossly 
wrong the mystery, — mysterious from any 
point of view, — if we seek too deeply to 
penetrate, or too precisely to define that Per- 
son. That was how they treated Arthur, — 
some denying that he was what he claimed 
to be ; others maintaining that he was more 
than he claimed to be ; none compassing his 
practical meaning for life ; and even his last 
knight fain to deceive him in the matter 
of his dying request. Ah ! what an epic 
is that of Tennyson's! Would it might 
teach us ! 

It is to this point, then, that we now come 
in closing ; namely, to note that Christ is the 
centre of this movement. 

I. I wish to indicate this, first. In regard 
to many men outside the Church altogether, 



172 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

the earnest doubters and unbelievers, who, 
as we saw in the first discourse, are also in 
a movement, an advance, which differen- 
tiates them from the like type in earlier 
periods, so that the true men among them 
are more earnest and reverent, and are 
pained not to believe. 

We are told that, as Jesus hung upon the 
cross, it was where many passed, and that 
they looked on him, and that some, even 
among those farthest from the faith, were 
touched ; for example, the Centurion. I 
should like to follow the lives of those who 
saw him, and observe if they were not per- 
manently affected by the sight. Christ said 
he would, if lifted up, draw all men unto him. 
I wonder if this saying of his did not begin 
to be fulfilled while he hung there on the 
cross. It is so, at any rate, with the men 
of whom we are now thinking. Jesus of 
Nazareth, whom they do not confess to be 
Jesus also of the skies, has his hold on them. 
Of course it is not iust the hold he has, I 
hope, on you and me. Would God it were 
an ampler hold on them ; yes, and on us, 



Christ its Centre, 173 

likewise ! But, of its kind, it is as real as 
on you and me, — if not as adequate, at any 
rate as real. Let us see how this is. 

There have been certain figures in history 
from which the world never has been able to 
get aw^ay. One of them is composite, the 
figure of the old Greek life, shown us by 
wonderful Homer. Whatever person, and 
whatever civilization, has beheld this com- 
posite portrayal of antique life, will never be 
the same, after the sight, as before. So, too, 
specifically, of the figure of Socrates, or the 
figure of Dante, or the figure of Martin 
Luther, or the figure of William the Silent, 
or the figure of Shakespeare. 

Now like these, only vastly deeper, more 
acute, more potent in influence, more con- 
structive of life, is the figure of Jesus, with 
these men. Homer gives a composite, uni- 
versal expression of the antique ; Socrates, of 
the moral, — of truth-seeking, inward-voice- 
obeying, spiritual intelligence ; Dante, of 
lofty spirit, betwixt the old world and the 
new ;" Luther, of the Germanic impulse, and 
of its emancipation into spiritual liberty; 



1 74 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

William the Silent, of the spirit of tolerance 
and freedom and comprehension ; Shake- 
speare, of the heart of man in all time. 

But not one of these approaches the signifi- 
cance of the figure of the Lord Jesus, nor do 
all of them. There he is. There he depends 
from the cross. One cannot say ancient or 
modern of him, for he is of all time, as ap- 
propriate to Homer's age as to the age of 
Augustus, as appropriate to the age of Vic- 
toria as to the age of Dante ; in fact, dateless, 
timeless, a being belonging to the forever. 
One cannot associate him with Socrates, for 
he is morally much vaster than Socrates ; nor 
with Luther or William, for they are only 
tapers from him ; nor with Shakespeare, for 
he knows all that Shakespeare knows, is 
vastly more universal, being Semitic as well 
as Indo-European, and, where Shakespeare 
gropes in the dark, as in the Sonnets, he is 
all light, as in the fourteenth to the seven- 
teenth of Saint John. 

Now this universal figure, this Man of 
sorrows depending from the cross, is there, 
— there and unremovable ; and, being now 



Christ its Centre, 175 

universally diffused abroad, through the lives 
of him, the comments on him, the universal 
impression of him, he is swaying these men, 
— swaying them by the power of his tran- 
scendent character, his unequalled sayings, 
and the tout-ensemble of his personality. To 
his thoughts these men bow. To his con- 
ceptions they more and more adapt their 
lives. He has softened their scoffing. He 
has made them tender and earnest. They 
do not acknowledge, as we do, his Deity, 
but they bend to his character. 

And thus it comes about, in peoples that 
know Christ, even though many among them 
are ungodly, that the Christ-thought gets the 
upper hand ; that complicated elections sim- 
plify themselves ; that an aroused public 
conscience registers the verdict of the Lord 
Jesus; that great tyrannies fall down; that 
great wars come to the right end ; and that 
the King of kings, in the person of our 
Lord, goes forth to every conflict with 
no uncertainty what the ultimate outcome 
will be. 

It would be easy to establish what I have 



176 The Newer Religious Thinki^ig. 

affirmed from the sayings of men of this type, 
but I have enough suggested the proof. Of 
the truer spirit outside the faith, Christ is the 
centre. Already it is under his resistless 
eye. Already it swings, however unwit- 
tingly, to his bidding. 

2. The same is true, with augmented 
force, of those in the Church, but outside 
so-called " evangelical " lines. And the aug- 
mented force lies in this, that, while, in 
distinction from you and me, they deny the 
true Deity of the Lord Jesus, they regard 
him as very specially related to God. 

In him, they say, God has most perfectly 
manifested himself. There is a divine mys- 
tery, they affirm, about this wonderful being. 
Him they count their Saviour, their leader, 
their glorious exemplar. They do not go as 
far as we. We are sorry they do not. But 
they go a good distance. They accept him 
as Master. He marshals them. He directs 
them. Now these men, as I have earlier 
pointed out, are in one section of the newer 
religious thinking ; and, in their newer 
thought, Christ is central, — his character, 



Christ its Centre, I'j'j 

his way of helping men, his simplicity, his 
incisiveness, his lofty and tender spirit. If 
afar off, as some of us would say, they never- 
theless follow Jesus. Yes, and perchance, 
many a time, nearer than we. 

I have met personally with two affecting 
illustrations of this within a few days. A 
young minister of a " non-evangelical " body, 
consuming with zeal, love, service, introduced 
me to an aged parishioner of his, and left us 
together. Then began this old man to testify, 
almost with tears, to what this young man 
was doing for him and for his church. " We 
never had," he said, " such a minister. There 
was never a minister that did so much for 
me." Why 1 I knew why. He never had 
had a minister who so completely, however 
defective his doctrine, lived as in the pres- 
ence and power of the Lord Jesus. 

The other illustration was in a well- 
stocked private library. I took down a 
book bearing on the life of the Lord Jesus. 
Struck by it, I asked my host what he knew 
of its author. *' He is an Englishman," 
replied my friend, " ' non-evangelical,' an 



178 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

advanced man. I visited him when I was 
abroad. He is a great scholar, a great 
thinker, but, like Martineau, most devout. 
His home suggests an oratory, redolent of 
sanctity and prayer." 

Here, then, were a young New England 
pastor, of one " non-evangelical " denomina- 
tion, and a great English scholar of another, 
the doctrinal deficiencies of both of whom 
you and I would regret; but both of whom 
were not only under the general moral influ- 
ence, as in the case of men outside the faith, 
but also under the personal and spiritual 
power of the Lord Jesus Christ. The exam- 
ples are typical. They suggest, out of life, 
my point.-^ 

3. Without going into other divisions of 
the Church, I come now to " Evangelicals," 
such as we. And, first, those of them who 

1 One has only to think of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the 
author of " In His Name," and of Dr. Andrew P. Peabody 
(passed on March 10, 1893), who was as devout and tender a 
disciple as the Saint John he loved so well, to understaad 
how truly Christian, in the New Testament sense of that 
word, are multitudes whom those who claim to be more ac- 
ceptable Christians than they, have so far forgotten the spirit 
of Christ as to pronounce "unevangelical." (See pp. 208, 209.) 



Christ its Centre. 179 

have little responsiveness to the freshened 
religious thinking of our time. 

Conservatives, we should call them. But 
some of them are, along practical lines, 
mightily parts of a progressive movement. 
The dead Spurgeon is an example. Very 
conservative in theory, in practical directions 
he was radical, — pushing for new methods, 
new appliances, new instrumentalities, build- 
ing up his great Metropolitan Temple work, 
his Lay College, his Orphanage, etc. The 
living General Booth, of the Salvation Army, 
is another example. Book after book falls 
from his pen. The drum-beat of the army 
associated with his name, like the drum-beat 
of the army of England, follows the rising 
sun around the world. Dwight L. Moody 
is another example, — fearless, hospitable, 
asking Professor (now President) Harper, 
who so much disturbs some people about 
the Old Testament, to speak at his Sum- 
mer School. 

Conservative men are all these, and 
many another, yet advancing men ; mainly 
advancing in practical directions, it is true, 



1 80 The Newer Religious Tki^zking, 

but parts of the great world movement. 
Need I ask who inspires them ; who is 
central to their progress ; who is the 
Leader, Captain, All-in-All of the Spur- 
geons, Booths, Moodys, and those of like 
temper, in the great marching army of 
Christian workers of this type? It is he 
with the thorn-marks in his brow, the nail- 
prints in his hands, the spear-thrust in his 
side. 

4. And next, and finally, we come to those 
members of " evangelical " bodies, to whom 
I have made repeated reference, who, in in- 
tellectual as well as p'ractical lines, are parts 
of the newer religious thinking. 

They are the Coleridges, the Arnolds, 
the Robertsons, the Maurices, the Kingsleys, 
the Bushnells, among the dead. They are the 
Farrars, the Phillips Brookses,^ the Heber 
Newtons, the T. T. Hungers, the Wash- 
ington Gladdens, the Lyman Abbotts, the 
Egbert C. Smyths, among the living. They 

1 Dead, alas ! January 23, 1893. But never so alive as 
now, on the earth as well as in heaven. " It is expedient for 
you that I go away." 



Christ its Centre. i8i 

are, at once as practical men and as intel- 
lectual men, in the newer religious thinking. 
They have their faults, perchance their errors. 
But to their voices the voice of the souls of 
sinning, fallen, needy humanity responds. 

And there is but one centre to their think- 
ing and their work, — namely, the Crucified 
One. Believing that he was in the form of 
God, but counted it not a thing to grasp 
after to hold equality with God, but, the 
rather, emptied himself, took the form of a 
servant, was made in the likeness of men, 
humbled himself, and became obedient to 
death, even the death" of the cross, — they 
hold him therein to have impersonated, as 
in no other way it could be done, the great 
heart of God; and that therefore, not so 
much because he was God, though he was 
God, but because in flesh and blood he 
embodied the infinitely sacrificial heart of 
God, " God highly exalted him, and gave 
unto him the name which is above every 
name;" and "that in the name of Jesus 
every knee " shall " bow, of things in heaven 
and things on earth and things under the 



1 82 The Newer Religious Thinking. 

earth, and that every tongue " shall " con- 
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory 
of God the Father." 

This is their conviction, this their faith, 
this their inspiration. Along this line they 
are moving. God is God, they believe, and 
Christ is God, not so much because they 
are God, though they are that, but because 
they are God-like, — self-emptying, sacrificial, 
spending and being spent for others, for 
men, and for the spirits above and beyond 
men. Here they see God resting his high- 
est claim, and Christ his highest, not in 
Deity per se, though they are that, but in 
God-like love, sacrifice, self-emptying. 

A universe could not be called into being, 
these men remember, without infinite suffer- 
ing. This infinite suffering, God, — this 
infinite suffering, Christ, — these men re- 
member, was ready to undergo, and thus to 
be, as it were, " slain from the foundation of 
the world." Human beings, and other spir- 
itual existences, could not be called into 
being — any more than the coming into 
being of a family of children is possible — 



Christ its Centre, 183 

without immense suffering, and immense 
sin as the sequel. These, too, God, — these, 
too, Christ, — was willing to undergo and 
endure. This self-emptying and self-forget- 
ting — as is slightly suggested by the self- 
emptying and self-forgetting of a parent — 
did God, and especially God in Christ, 
make the law of the Divine Being. There- 
fore, by highest right God is God ; therefore 
Christ is highly exalted, and given " the 
name which is above every name." 

Do you catch the thought } Do you see 
how far-reaching it is '^, " God is love." 
" God so loved the world." God's claim is 
based there. God's command of us is ful- 
crumed there. Not on sovereignty, though 
there is sovereignty enough ; not on law, 
though there is law enough ; not on right, 
though there is right enough ; not on jus- 
tice, though God is just; but on love, — the 
love of an infinite and eternal sacrifice, pene- 
trating the world, pervading it, conquering 
it, lowering its proud look, bringing down its 
lofty head, turning it as the rivers of water 
are turned. Love is the clew: love is the 



1 84 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

key, — and love running through everything: 
through nature, making it sacred ; through 
history, hallowing it ; through life, imparting 
to it a new meaning, so that light comes, 
freedom comes, growth comes, yea, the new 
heavens and new earth, wherein dwelleth 
righteousness. 

Constantine, on the eve of battle, seemed, 
as everybody knows, to see in the sky a 
cross, and the legend, " In this symbol con- 
quer,"^ In it he did conquer. But little did 
he guess, or did the Church of his age, or of 
the succeeding ages, guess the full import 
of the symbol. The full import is the eternal 
sacrifice in the heart of God. Of this im- 
port our age, enabled thereto by its mighty 
enlargings on every side, is, for the first 
time, getting some adequate glimpses. To 
its power this age is bending, — love, the 
cross, the infinite sacrifice in the heart of 
God, emulated in the hearts, the thoughts, 
the lives of men. And, as if it blazed 
before the sight of men in every sky, it is 
saying, " In this symbol conquer," — breaking 
down all oppressions, righting all wrongs, 

1 Strictly, " thou slialt conquer." 



Christ its Centre. 185 

bettering steadily a world so in need of bet- 
terment, lifting life into higher thoughts, 
nobler ideals, loftier conceptions, more ade- 
quate realizations and completions, under 
the lead of the Crucified, — he the centre, 
he highly exalted, and, in some sense, all 
knees bent to him, and all tongues confess- 
ing him. 

This is more than getting salvation, though 
it is salvation. It is salvation getting us. 
This is more than gaining heaven, though it 
gains heaven. It is heaven gaining us, — 
gaining us over to its ruling idea, filling us 
with it, transfiguring us by it, and making 
it to be true that we, his servants, both here 
and there, serve him, and have his name in 
our foreheads. 

Here it is that the newer religious think- 
ing, — not mine, not yours, not any man's, 
not perfect either, but still faulty and inad- 
equate enough, — along the pathway of which 
God is leading the world, and of which I 
have sought to say something to you these 
closing Sunday nights of the year, shows 
upon it the divine handwriting, being from 



1 86 The Newer Religious Thinking, 

Christ, and centred in him, and moving 
toward him. 

And there is only one thing for you and 
me to do, — a thing which, at the best, w^e 
never have enough done yet, — namely, to 
throw ourselves into this infinite Christ prin- 
ciple, into this infinite law of the spiritual 
kingdom, into this divine imperative of the 
universe, and to become the very children 
and personal presentments of the cross. 
He who therefrom depends, leads, and ever 
will lead, turning and overturning, conquer- 
ing and to conquer, and renewing evermore 
— even as it is written, " Behold, I make all 
things new " — thought, feeling, life, yea, 
even you and me. To him be the glory, 
both now and forever. Amen. 



APPENDIX A. 
ONE TYPE OF NATURE TEACHING. 



NOTE. 

At the point in Discourse IV. (page 124) whence reference is 
made to Appendix A, I have spoken not only of the testifying 
power of nature indirectly and in general ways, but of its more 
direct voice. What, it was asked, are those impulses of peoples, 
those movements of them, those peculiarities which give them 
each, as it were, a vocation and a distinctive message for the 
world? "All these," as was there said, "have a place in that 
revelation of God which the world is." 

To illustrate this subject in a single direction, I append the 
closing observations in an address of mine before the New Eng- 
land Water Works Association, given in Boston, December 12, 
1888, entitled "Water in Some of its Higher Relations," and 
printed in the Association's "Journal" for March, 1889. The 
last paragraph, not in the address, but added as a note when it 
was printed, is here brought into the text. 

Nature being of God not only, but God being in nature, and 
speaking through it, when shall that great heresy be arrested by 
which the two are put in antithesis, and by which nature is so 
demeaned as at best only now and then to be summoned into 
court " evidentially " ? When shall its holy voice on all sides of 
us be simply and livingly heard ? Children so hear it, — " the 
greatest in the Kingdom of heaven." So do the poets, — suc- 
ceeding, as they know how to, in remaining children always. We 
must come to their place, or miss much of the sweetness, depth, 
and glory of God. 



ONE TYPE OF NATURE TEACHING. 

IF this seems fanciful to you, this mighty impulse 
of descending streams, of great rivers, of spark- 
ling archipelagoes, and of bordering seas, in giving 
a type to national life, and in helping set forward 
world-historical movements, I ask you to think of 
two or three more modern instances. 

What, then, let me ask, was the Anglo-Saxon 
fatherland? It was Teutonic. Why, then, do our 
brothers of Germany, and of the Low Countries, 
stay mainly on their own soil, or colonize only 
feebly, while v/e ourselves, having been first trans- 
ferred to the mother Islands, have colonized the 
world, are erecting mighty nationalities on three 
continents, and are giving to the whole world our 
institutions and our speech? Before you answer 
this question I ask you to sail along the shores 
of the Continent, opposite Great Britain ; to note 
that there is hardly a respectable natural harbor 
on the French coast; to note how remote and 
difficult of access are the better harbors of the 
North Sea and of the Baltic; and then, crossing 



190 Appendix A, 



the Channel, to observe that our mother Islands 
are fairly fringed with bays, inlets, safe harbors, 
and inviting river mouths. Sail up the Irish coast, 
for example, with this distinction in mind. The 
whole coast configuration, the whole maritime 
quality of these islands, were a perpetual predis- 
position to the sea, to its hardy employments, to 
its openness of mind, to its far-reaching adventure. 
Water, and the water impulse and opportunity, are 
the answer, physically, to the question why the 
Anglo-Saxon civilization, which, indeed, had within 
itself elements mightily adapted to the same end, 
is erecting great nationalities on three continents, 
and is imparting its spirit to the world. 

But let us keep within the lifetime of our own 
generation. Go back, in our own country, to i860. 
Why was it, in all the stress and conflicting senti- 
ment of that stormy period, that North and South 
did not separate, like Abram and Lot dividing the 
land? One great reason, one conclusive practical 
reason, one unanswerable argument to multitudes 
who would not have stood upon theory, was the 
simple natural fact that a mighty river coursed 
from north to south through the alienated sec- 
tions ; that the natural flow of waters, and the 
natural dip of water-sheds, pointed out that this 
ought to be one land, not two; and that it was 
impracticable for it to maintain itself as two. 



One Type of Nature Teaching, 191 

Or go back to 1870. There is a magnificent 
river, almost a second Rhine, descending from the 
southwest by a northeasterly course to the Rhine, 
and joining it at Coblenz, namely, the Moselle. 
The two streams are, for all practical purposes, 
one. The country drained by them is the same in 
character. The Moselle belonged within the old 
German frontier. All the Rhine love was shared 
by it. But France had claimed and held the 
Moselle. The struggle of 1870 came. Then 
the old river passion awoke. That fair valley was 
wrested back. In the great German national 
monument, far up on the heights overlooking the 
Rhine at Bingen, where colossal bronzes have been 
erected as a memorial of the uprising and uni- 
fication of the German peoples in that war, one 
member of the group is a figure representing the 
Moselle, won back to its sisterhood with the Rhine. 
But the river love and the river spirit, expressed 
thus in bronze, were even realer and more con- 
structive than the statue indicates in that fierce 
national struggle. 

The final higher relation of water which I men- 
tion is one difficult to be defined, and of which 
I can take time to give only two illustrations ; but 
it is .as real and mighty as any of the others. 
I refer to the power of water on the human imagi- 
nation. And I think I need hardly contend, before 



192 Appendix A. 



a company as intelligent as this, that genuine 
and profound influences on the imagination are 
among the most powerful springs of human 
conduct. 

I ask you, then, first, to think of the Arthurian 
legends. There is a great mass of them. Their 
principal home is the British Isles. Their con- 
structive thought is, the reappearance of Arthur, 
in the ages to come, to bring in days better even 
than the old days of that king and of his Table 
Round. They have been cast into perhaps their 
best practical, as certainly into their most poetic, 
form in Tennyson's " Idyls of the King." Any 
one who has studied them, and who is at all 
familiar with the spirit of Anglo-Saxon history, 
will, I think, admit, that they well typify the best 
movements of that history ; that they are true race 
legends ; and that much of their promise bids fair 
yet to be practically fulfilled. Now the point 
which I ask you to notice is, the play of springs, 
waters, and inland lakes in them. They are water 
and insular legends. Their delicacy, their purity, 
their freshness, their promise, their sense of mys- 
tery and of fate, their sense, too, of goodness, of 
trust, and of love, are water born. They are 
genuine idyls. But they are insular, they are of 
springs, streams, and inland lakes. These begot 
those. From the waters, that is to say, came the 



One Type of Nature Teaching. 193 

thoughts, the ideals, the aspirations. The whole 
intellectual and moral fabric, so true to our 
history, and so prophetic of its issue, is insep- 
arably connected with the power of water over 
the imagination. 

But, as you may consider this too vague and 
general, I ask you to think of a phenomenon of 
our own century. Just at its dawn two young 
men, warm friends, took a journey together into 
the region of the English Lakes, then little fre- 
quented, — and now, by the bye, about to be 
utilized for the supply of water for the great city 
of Manchester, perhaps seventy-five miles away. 
The young men were more than charmed, they 
were fascinated, by the seclusion of those vales, 
by the beauty of the wild glens, by the fantastic 
shapes of the mountains (themselves water-carved), 
by the humidity of the region which the perfect 
drainage of the soil hindered nevertheless from 
being wet, by the play of cloud, mist, and sunlight, 
but especially by the lakes themselves, and par- 
ticularly by Grasmere and Rydal Water. One of 
the young men, by far the greater genius of the 
two, was enamoured instantly, and kindled the 
slower susceptibilities of the other. The former of 
these young men was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
The latter was William Wordsworth. Within a 
year Wordsworth settled by Grasmere, and in its 

13 



1 94 Appendix A . 



neighborhood he spent a long life. Coleridge set- 
tled by Derwentwater, not far away, but after some 
years removed to London. It would be easily 
possible to show that the lives of both these men 
were definitely affected by the then wild lakes; 
that the lakes entered into their thinking and 
their theories ; that, in the case of Coleridge, his 
power over English and American thought in the 
first half of this century — a power so great that it 
can hardly be estimated — was largely contributed 
to by the lakes ; and that, as for Wordsworth, who 
lived by Grasmere and Rydal all his life, and now 
lies in Grasmere churchyard, and who marks a 
new epoch in English poetry, the lakes were as the 
water of life to him. Of Southey, De Quincey, and 
Scott (whose own lakes were, however, those of 
the Scottish Highlands), of Wilson, and of Thomas 
Arnold, much might be said in the same direction. 
There was never really any ** Lake School," except 
in fancy, but there was a mighty, deathless lake lifcy 
whose powder in English literature and in Anglo- 
Saxon living will not soon die. And here was 
done for a few rare minds by these inland lakes 
and streams, visibly, palpably, and in a way vastly 
affecting our age, what less palpably, but not less 
really, was done by the operation of the same 
causes, through the Arthurian legends, for our 
Anglo-Saxon people during many centuries. 



One Type of Nature Teaching, 195 

The reader will observe that the two illustra- 
tions are drawn from within the ancient northern 
glacial belt. It would have been interesting to 
draw a third from within the same belt on our side 
of the Atlantic. What Lake Walden and other 
New England lakes similarly formed, and their 
associated streams, did for Thoreau, Emerson, 
and Hawthorne, there is no estimating. Indeed, 
perhaps Hawthorne is never so much at home in 
any of his foreign writing as in his English Lake 
Notes. The waters of the old ice lands, having 
their own peculiar setting and character, need 
to be studied in relation to the history of the 
imagination, and of national spirit, by some one 
expert both in glacial action, and in literature 
and folk-lore. Were all the facts known, it would 
probably appear that the lakes and streams of 
this belt, presenting as they do a singular com- 
bination of thought-impressing elements, have, 
from the times when man began to think, over 
and over again induced such personal expe- 
riences as the Arthurian legends seem to imply, 
as the Coleridge-Wordsworthian lakes passion has 
put into biography, and as Thoreau, the New 
England solitary, lived out. There seem to 
have .been analogous experiences among our 
[American] aborigines. It is doubtful if Scandi- 
navian literature can be explained without them. 



1 96 Appendix A . 



The Tell legends spring ashore, as it were, from 
the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons. How 
well the ice wrought ! How much mightier than 
Merlin's is the water's enchantment in the old ice 
lands ! 



APPENDIX B. 
OMITTED PART OF DISCOURSE VI. 



NOTE. 

"Ye cannot bear them now," said Christ of "many things" 
he wished to utter, and refrained himself. He is doing so still. 
And, friend, he is doing so by you and me. This should humble 
us. It should also give us quick insight and tact what to say to 
others. For one man's noonday is another's midnight ; one man's 
holiest truth of God, another's heresy or blasphemy. " He hath 
spoken blasphemy," they said of him, the blameless, to whom be- 
longed perfect vision. Here is one range in which ministers need 
Christliness. What to say, what not to say, and how to express 
the message given them, only Christ can teach. 

When we had come to the last discourse of this series, I could 
not go right on, but must pause. The substance of what I said 
in the pause, follows. It is not included in the discourse as 
printed, because matter more pertinent to the close of the dis- 
cussion had a right to be substituted for it there. (See note, 
p. i6i.) It appears here for the same reason that caused it to be 
spoken, namely, to help any persons who, having come thus far, 
may need its help. God bless them, every one 1 



OMITTED PART OF DISCOURSE VI.^ 

THERE is in this age, as in every thinking age, 
a movement, or progress, of reHgious thought. 
This is not a movement of any man, or of any 
institution, or of any sect or denomination, or of 
any great division of the Church, such as Pres- 
byterian or Anglican or Lutheran, or such as 
Protestant or Cathohc or Greek, or, indeed, of any 
yet wider division among men, hke that between 

1 Synopsis. — There is in this age a movement, or progress, 
of religious thought. — This not of a man, or institution, or sec- 
tion of the Church, or of the Church itself, exclusively, but of the 
world. — Multiform, doubtless in error in part, but God-inspired 
and Godward-moving. — Illustrated by the analogy of the literary 
movement of the past century within the languages of Europe. — 
Able to be perceived by us contemporaneously. — Profitable for 
preaching. — Our Saviour's desire that men should note the signs 
of the times. — His Spirit to guide into all the truth. — This, 
properly, the temper of Protestantism, and particularly of Con- 
gregationalism. — The preacher had been understood hardly 
rightly by some, conscientiously, however. — Why he had spoken, 
with what shrinking, and in what attitude toward the subject. — 
A personal Credo. — Short summary of these discourses. — Christ 
the centre of the present movement, or progress, — (i) For, etc. 
[as on page i6o]. 



200 Appendix B, 



Christians and those who are Theists merely, or 
like that between the men of faith and the men of 
unfaith. It is a movement, rather, of our whole 
race, in the realm of the religious faculty. It 
affects different individuals, different classes of 
men, different divisions of the religious world, 
variously, according to their characteristics and 
points of view, but it is one movement, in different 
parts and in different manifestations. 

I hope I make my meaning clear. I am not 
speaking now of particular religious behefs. I am 
speaking of the religious heart of men. This heart 
is moving. God is touching it. Sometimes it is 
moving under forms of error, feeling after God. 
Sometimes it is moving under simple, clear 
thoughts of God, in holy men as it were seeing 
him. But it is one movement. And that Infinite 
Being who lives and moves in all things, lives and 
moves in it. 

Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean from an 
altogether different subject, namely, literature. 
We have long known that there was a distinct 
movement in English literature, beginning late in 
the last century, blossoming forth early in this, and 
unfolding with the century. Now those who have 
given themselves to the comparative study of the 
literature of the same period in other languages on 
the Continent of Europe, have discovered, and are 



Omitted Part of Discourse VI, 201 

gradually tracing out, a corresponding movement 
in the literature of those languages. The lan- 
guages were different; the races were different; 
the points of view were different. But the move- 
ment was one, and marked by almost identically 
the same impulses. This has been specially im- 
pressed upon me by a conversation lately had on 
the subject with a gentleman of high attainments 
who is making this comparative study his specialty, 
and who, I hope, will by and by write on it. 

Consider, I pray you, what an impressive thing 
this is, — to know that, while our English literature 
was taking a new form and bent, almost unwit- 
tingly the literature of the Continental languages 
was taking, intrinsically, a corresponding form and 
bent. What does such a fact say to us? Does it 
not say that the men speaking the different lan- 
guages of Europe, having been for ages under 
the same general tutelage of civic struggle and of 
Christian influence, were responding under one 
and the same guidance of God, to the touch of his 
breath and mind, and through representative 
writers, each unknown to the others at the start, 
were breaking forth into new and higher literary 
expression? I cannot look at it in any other way. 
And* this circumstance I regard as yet another evi- 
dence that the God and Father of us all has not 
left the world alone, either in religious or in secular 



202 Appendix B, 



matters, but is moving in it, and bending it to his 
thoughts. 

Now, similarly, in the matter of the religious 
impulse and thought in men, there is a movement, 
pervasive, world-wide, diverse in form, diverse 
in expression, often faulty, perchance repeatedly 
in error, but, in one way or another, feeling its 
way or thinking its way nearer to God. In ages 
past, so isolated were men, and so inadequate was 
their interchange of thought, that such a move- 
ment could not be discerned as of wide extent in 
its time, but was so revealed later to the student 
of the history of the respective times. But to-day, 
so near is the world, in its parts, brought to itself 
as a whole, by steam, electricity, and the printing- 
press, that we can see on its many sides this 
movement going on, and, contemporaneously, can 
watch it. 

It has accordingly seemed to me that this im- 
pressive thing, the movement of religious thought 
at the present day, discernible by us contempora- 
neously, and of as much vaster moment than any 
movement of literature as religion itself is of 
vaster moment than literature, would be a profita- 
ble subject for our meditation these closing Sunday 
nights of the year, so far as absence of other Sun- 
day-night appointments left us the evenings free 
for such meditation. We were to climb, so to 



Omitted Part of Discourse VI. 203 

speak, into a lofty lookout, and gaze over wide 
extending land and sea, to observe how the 
thoughts of men were moving, and how freshly 
they were thinking of God. 

Our Saviour criticised the children of light for 
not being wise enough in their generation. He 
indicated that it might be a mark of hypocrisy to 
have insight about such signs in the outer world 
as those of the weather, but not to be able to dis- 
cern the signs of the times. By this, I suppose he 
meant that the persons addressed, being discerning 
enough to detect the indications of the face of 
nature, but wilfully shutting their eyes against the 
new spiritual light which was breaking upon the 
world in their time, were not candid ; and that, 
therefore, since they professed to be holy men, 
they were, in so far, untrue to their profession, 
or, in other words, hypocritical. And if ever I, 
for one, find myself unwilling with open eyes to 
behold the light on religious matters which God 
is bringing to our time, I shall fear that it is 
from some timidity or prejudice or self-interest 
in me ; and that thus, professing to be a child of 
God, I am to this degree hypocritical in it, that I 
will not let God teach me, his child, the lessons 
he is trying to teach me. 

Our Saviour also affirmed that he had many 
things to say which men could not then bear, and 



204 Appendix B, 



promised the Spirit of Truth to guide men into 
all the truth. The same has been the characteris- 
tic attitude of Protestantism, — not to fear the truth, 
but to seek it and be ready for it. The same, 
particularly, has been the temper of our Congrega- 
tionalism, Robinson urging the departing Pilgrims 
to expect fresh light to break from the Bible, and 
— as an early New England writer reports — de- 
ploring the tendency of the Reformation to stick 
where Luther or Calvin or Knox stopped, instead 
of, in their spirit, going on into the whole truth 
as God should continue to make it clear. 

I would not say an unkind word of any one, 
nor judge any one. I would only criticise myself, 
and judge myself, and I do that severely. But I 
am at a loss to see how I could have been under- 
stood in some instances quite as I have, in the 
matter of these discourses, — I doubt not conscien- 
tiously, and from true motives, so that I entertain 
for any so understanding me not only respect, but 
a tender and sincere love. Such are, indeed, 
among the truest people that I know. 

In this spirit of respect and love let us look at 
the matter for a moment. And, first, speaking 
generally, think you, dear friends, it is a right 
thing, or not a right thing, for a Christian preacher 
to attempt to describe a general age movement 
of religious thought in this the most wonderful 
period since Christ left the world? 



Omitted Part of Discourse VI. 205 

And, next, speaking personally, do you think 
that I, who love you, could lightly give you one 
troubled or anxious moment? I trust what you 
know of me will lead you to believe otherwise. 
The fact is, — I may as well confess it, — that when 
the question arose in my own soul whether I should 
attempt to do this or not, — and I consulted on the 
subject with no human being, — I shrank from it 
almost with trembling. Having put the title of 
the sermons in the printer's hands for announce- 
ment, I came pretty near resolving to draw my 
pen through the proof, and to have the type dis- 
tributed before it went to press. And I only re- 
frained from doing so under a solemn conviction 
of the duty of speaking to my people, and to 
any who cared to come and hear, of this move- 
ment of religious thought in our time, — not as 
indorsing it in all respects, for in some respects I 
could not indorse it, but as describing and char- 
acterizing it for our information and help; and 
under a solemn conviction, likewise, that not to 
speak would be to fail to act the part of the house- 
holder spoken of by our Lord, who " bringeth 
forth out of his treasure things new and old." 

And this was all that I was doing. I was not 
expressing, except where I indicated it, my own 
opinions, or those of any other man, or of any set 
of men, or of any institution, or of any wing of 



2o6 Appendix B, 



thought; but I was characterizing a movement, a 
trend and march of current history, of which, in 
one form or another, whether we will or not, we 
are all a part. And I expressly stated that this 
movement might err. We are liable to err in 
everything, particularly in everything new or un- 
tried ; and I said that it was one of the perils of 
our time that its newer religious thought might 
stray in this or that particular.^ 

But what, then, are we to do ? Are we to shut 
our eyes? Are we to stop thinking? When the 
age is thinking, are we to refuse to consider its 
thoughts, and learn from them? I cannot do so. 
Nor can I, as a Christian preacher, think it right 
to do so by my people. Especially I cannot when 
I see our Lord, who, had he remained quiet on 
certain subjects, might have received a wide pop- 
ular following, refusing to do so, but truly speak- 
ing his thought, though death in consequence was 
certain; and when I see Saint Paul, all through 
the Acts, while conciliatory and charitable, bear- 
ing witness to unpopular truth, and suffering for it. 
I must follow in our Lord's steps and in Saint 
Paul's in like exigencies, should they arise. 

It has seemed to me right, in this discourse, — 
which, in closing the series, is partly of the nature 
of recapitulation, — that I should allude, lovingly, 
1 See, for example, p. 109. 



Omitted Part of Discourse VI. 207 

to this matter. I again testify to the conscientious- 
ness and true motive, as I trust, of any dissent, and 
to my love for those who may be in such a case. I 
can well understand that approach to truth which 
is theirs, and which seems to compel dissent. And 
I ask you who, in such numbers, have followed 
the discourses with eager interest, to have for any 
such the same respect, love, and sense of point of 
view. For if any of us have larger light, the 
proof of the true heart in that light will be love, 
and love's power to appreciate and understand 
those who have not the same light. 

I ought to add that, while I have not been ex- 
pounding my opinions, but describing a move- 
ment, it is true, nevertheless, that my heart joys 
and sings with the movement. Not able to agree 
with it in every particular, I believe its trend to be 
in the right direction, and it stirs and thrills my 
whole being. But, lest any misunderstand, I give, 
what will perhaps be reassuring, this my personal 
Credo: — 

/ believe in the living God, Father^ Son, and 
Holy Spirit, one and yet three: the Son and the 
Spirit with the Father very God: the Son eternally 
begotten : no man saved except through the Son : no 
man saved except born into a new life through the 
Spirit: the Bible, rightly interpreted, the one tran- 
scendent literature, pointing lis to God, authoritative 



2o8 Appendix B. 



over life: sin awful, its consequences terrible , its 
punishment inevitable, perhaps without end: man 
deathless, to be clothed upon with a spiritual body, 
hardly so much to be judged as forever being judged 
by holy, and yet pitying and helping, God, and for- 
ever going, under such a God, to his own place: 
and eye 7tot haviftg seen nor ear heard nor heart of 
m.an co7iceived the things prepared, of good for the 
true and of evil for the false, i7t the larger life. 
Amen. 

I should need to say much more, fully to round 
out what I have put into so few words ; and my 
use of these words might, in turn, easily be misun- 
derstood : but so I believe, sincerely, and not hand- 
ling the words in any other than their obvious sense. 
And, so believing, I do not belong under certain 
denominational names which have been at one 
time or another spoken of as if they might be 
mine. I must, however, confess this, that I respect 
those denominations, love every true soul in them, 
wish I might go out in outward as well as in spir- 
itual fellowship to them, and believe that they, 
though I must dissent from them in certain par- 
ticulars, are, nevertheless, true parts of Christ's 
Church, are bearing witness to aspects of truth, 
which we are prone to overlook, and are only disfel- 
lowshipped by us through what, in the broad light 
of eternity, will be looked back to as a denying 



Omitted Part of Discourse VI, 209 

of the very spirit of our Lord, — done, however, 
through our having honestly mistaken what that 
spirit was. 

I now turn to our subject proper, namely, Christ 
the centre of the newer rehgious thinking. But 
even here, I must delay for a brief recapitulation. 

In the first, then, of these discourses I showed 
that, as there has been in the past, so there is now, 
a movement of religious thought, — not your 
movement, or mine, or that of any set of men, or 
division or denomination of Christendom, but a 
movement, — and I indicated some of its charac- 
teristics. 

In the second and third of these discourses I 
asked you to think of the mighty spring, or 
motive, underlying this movement. I pointed out 
how, both in its nature, and as regards the men in 
it, it is impelled by hunger after God and passion 
for men ; and, also, how this hunger and passion 
are leading to the re-study — not necessarily the 
rejection, but the re-study — and more adequate 
interpretation of some Christian doctrines and 
practices, with the consequent overthrow of certain 
idols of the mind in these directions. 

In the fourth and fifth discourses I asked you to 
think of the material, or data, out of which, induc- 
tively, this movement is going forward into larger 
and, as I believe it will ultimately prove, juster 

14 



2IO Appendix B, 



and more adequate conceptions of religious truth. 
I pointed out how it studies two books : the un- 
written book, consisting of nature, history, and life, 
or, in one word, the world ; and the written book, 
the Bible. I pointed out how it seeks to let each 
book throw light on the other, and help interpret 
the other ; but that it has an undiminished rever- 
ence for, and submission to the Bible, rightly 
understood and interpreted. 

It is to this point, then, that we now come in 
closing; namely, to note that, etc. [as on page 
171]. 



APPENDIX C. 

SOME PLAIN QUESTIONING. 



N O T E. 

There are aspects of discussion which are incapable of system- 
atic treatment. They are matters of point of view, of antago- 
nistic or sympathetic approach, of objections or confirmatory 
considerations suggested by the mind, etc. They require per- 
sonal conference, question and answer, and downright, thorough 
talk. Three supposed persons are accordingly suffered to do 
some of this hereinafter. One should not forget the dear resur- 
rection dialogue. The voice even of angels suffices not. The 
questioning mind insists on feeling its own way toward the light. 
And so it is written : — 

I. 

They [two angels] say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou .? 
She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, 
and I know not where they have laid him. 

II. 

She turned herself back, and beholdeth Jesus standing, and 
knew not that it was Jesus. 

Jesus saith unto her. Woman, why weepest thou .'' whom 
seekest thou .'' 

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him. Sir, if 
thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and 
I will take him away. 

Jesus saith unto her, Mary ! 

She turneth herself, and saith unto him, Master I 



SOME PLAIN QUESTIONING. 

I. 

UNDER this ** newer religious thinking," 
which, you say, is not yours, — though I 
should consider it a tolerably faithful reflection of 
your ideas, — but which is, the rather, of the time, 
and, indeed, of all of us, — a statement from which 
I beg to dissent, — what becomes of the religion of 
the lowly Jesus? 

B. It seems to me, friend, that the religion of 
Jesus is for the first time beginning to get ade- 
quate expression in this thinking. 

A. What! in such a worldly time as this? This 
is not such a time as Edward Payson's, or as Jona- 
than Edwards's, or as that of the Reformers, to go 
no farther back. 

B. I should hope it might in some ways im- 
prove upon those times. 

A, But I mean in spirit. We do not pray as 
much, nor fast as much, nor do we eschew the 
world as they did. 

B. Nor, let me add, as John the Baptist did. 
*' He that is but little in the Kingdom of heaven 



2 14 Appendix C, 



is greater than he." '' The Son of man came 
eating and drinking." 

A. But tell me, if you please, how the religion 
of the lowly Jesus is, as you have just said, '' for 
the first time beginning to get adequate expression 
in this thinking." 

B, In the matter of God. 

A. How? 

B. Jesus was in a living touch with his Father. 
He did not get it roundabout through Moses or 
Isaiah, but in direct consciousness. So getting it, 
he swept aside various traditional thoughts of God, 
to the scandal of many. The newer thinking is in 
an analogous temper. It, as it were, sees God, and 
hates the idols which have usurped his place. 

A. I call that very irreverent, to say the least. 
" No man hath seen God at any time." Besides, 
how can this human thinking, or any other, be 
likened to the thinking of the omniscient Jesus? 

B. " The pure in heart . . . shall see God." 

A. In heaven, it means. 

B. Yes, and also, in beginnings at least, on earth. 
We are bidden, moreover, to have the mind in us 
" which was also in Christ Jesus," and does not 
that mean that human thinking may — nay, should 
— be like that of Jesus? He, by the way, has 
told us that, at least in one particular, he is not 
omniscient. 



Some Plain Quesiioning. 215 

A. Well, go on. 

B, In this thinking, also, the passion of Jesus 
for men is waking up. 

A. I don't call these university extensions, these 
boys' clubs, etc., the passion of Jesus for men. 
He was seeking to save their immortal souls. 

B, Did he ever use the expression '' immortal 
soul"? In his personal handling of men did he 
ordinarily thrust forward that idea? Was he not 
feeding them, telling them where to cast the net, 
and becoming the friend of publicans and sinners? 

A. Go on. 

B. In this thinking, too, to a degree never 
equalled before, we are getting the approach of 
Jesus to nature. He was in the most perfect in- 
timacy and harmony with it, no naturalist or poet 
so much so.^ In this spirit the newer thinking 

1 With the Saviour, let us not forget, it was all vision. He 
had the second sight. The hen brooding her chickens; the 
sparrow fallen by the hedgerow ; the woman making bread ; the 
mason slowly raising the four walls of a house on rock or on 
sand ; the lily tossing on its stem ; the azure or murky sky ; the 
sower going forth to sow ; the fishers drawing their nets ; the mer- 
chantmen passing up and down along the Galilean caravan route ; 
the self-mastered centurions, under authority, and therefore keep- 
ing a peace and winning a love among a turbulent population, 
which proconsul, king, and emperor alike were unable to win ; the 
new Roman coinage finding its beneficent way into Palestine ; 
priest, Levite, and wretched Samaritan ; phylacteried and admired 
Pharisee, and native-born farmer of taxes for the foreigner, uni- 
versally hated; the wind blowing where it listed; the fig tree 



2i6 Appendix C, 



approaches nature, history, and hfe, — that is to 
say, the world, or nature in its larger sense. 

A. "The approach of Jesus to nature"? He 
lived above nature, and only used an occasional 
illustration from it, and — 

B. More than *' occasional," friend. 

A. That does not make any difference. His 
only use for nature was to illustrate spiritual truth 
by it. 

B. Did he not say that his Father, with whom 
he was one, fed the birds, and so clothed the grass 
of the field? Was not a divine intimacy with 
nature implied? 

A. We can't stop to dispute every point. I 
was about to say that he only used an occasional 
illustration from nature, and that his strong hold 
was with Scripture. 

B. And there, again, we have, in the newer 
thinking, an approach to the spirit and meaning 
of Scripture such as has not been had since Christ. 
It is for the real life of the Bible, for its very heart, 
that the newer thinking seeks. The Saviour was 

putting forth her leaves; the eagles gathering themselves to- 
gether, both zoological and Roman ; Herod's marble wonder, not 
yet builded after forty and six years, — all, everything, spoke to- 
him, and through him to men. " Never man so spake," they 
freely said. 'T was because he saw so much. Out of the abun- 
dance of the heart the mouth spake. — " Primary Qualifications 
for the Ministry,^ in '■^ Andover Review,^'' May-Juney 1893. 



Some Plain Questioning, 2 1 7 

doing that. Because he was doing it, his coun- 
trymen thought him destroying law and prophets ; 
just as many good people think now regarding 
some of the most thorough and devout Bible 
students. And as it is the real life of the Bible, 
its very heart, that the newer thinking seeks, 
so, as never before since Christ, it is finding it. 
Compare, for example, George Adam Smith's 
Isaiah with even so modern and strong a work as 
Alexander's on that book. 

A. ''George Adam Smith's Isaiah".? It is all 
politics ! 

B. Which are God in the world. You thought 
so when the Emancipation Proclamation went into 
effect. 

A. But politics when Lincoln freed the slave 
and politics now are two very different things. 

B. God not in them now? 

A. I should sooner call it the Devil in them. 
But I will ask you one question. What you have 
said may be all very well in theory, — though, to 
be frank, I don't believe one syllable of your 
theory; it seems to me a mere playing with 
words, — but what becomes of the Bible on such 
a view of it? 

B. Precisely what became of it before. It 
speaks to life just as then ; only its meaning is 
greatly deepened, because its spirit more than its 
letter speaks now. 



2i8 Appendix C, 



A. But who is to determine what its spirit is? 
Before these new theories came along, we had a 
plain '' Thus saith the Lord " about everything. 

B. Yes, "Thus saith the Lord, Send back the 
fugitive slaves as Saint Paul sent back Onesimus." 

A. I deny that. The pro-slavery men never 
took the spirit of the Bible. That little epistle to 
Philemon, only twenty-five verses of it in all, a 
mere note going back with the man's slave, they 
made more of than of all the rest of the Bible put 
together. For my part, when I used to hear the 
sermons from it, I often wished that Paul had never 
written it, or Onesimus had lost it, or Philemon's 
baby had thrown it into the fire. 

B. That is the very point. There are other 
passages, here and there in the Bible, which many 
a devout soul has wished had never been written, 
or had been lost, because they have been so 
misused. 

A, Hold ! I was only talking about Philemon. 

B. But I was talking about some other passages. 

A, Then I count what you say heterodox. 

B. It is not the first time I have heard that. 
Let us go back. The anti-slavery people insisted 
on the spirit of the Bible, and their opponents on 
its letter; and the latter asked, in effect, precisely 
the question which you were asking a moment 
ago, "Who is to determine what its spirit is?" 



Some Plain Questioning. 219 

Ah ! my friend, only the living Spirit of God, in 
the living spirits of men, can determine vi^hat the 
spirit of the Bible is. 

A. You mean that nothing is stable? 

B, Matters are stable in one sense. They are 
working ever toward the truth. But nothing is 
stable in another sense, if it be alive. Growth, con- 
tinual advance, as you grew from a boy to a man, 
and as slave days advanced into days of freedom, 
— this is the order of life. 

A. But we have those things now. 

B. And would you leave no future for you, and 
me, and our race? 

A. A future in heaven. 

B. But what shall we do there, with growth at 
an end? 

A. We shall not get there, if nothing is stable 
here. I want everything exact, fixed, and man- 
datory. 

B. The craving for that — the craving, that is 
to say, for outward authority — has taken many a 
good man to Rome. 

A. I am not that kind of a person. I take my 
stand with the Reformers, and demand a " Thus 
saith the Lord " for everything. 

B. Not apprehending what the spirit of the 
Reformers was, my friend. But let us see. Was 
not that what your son desired last night? Per- 



220 Appendix C, 



plexed on a certain question, did he not ask you 
to tell him just what to do? But you did not tell 
him. You were too sensible to do so. You said, 
" My son, you have arrived at years of discretion, 
and while I will give you any light on this matter 
which I can, you must be a man now, and decide 
your own questions." You did not give him, in 
other words, for reasons which seemed to you 
wise, what he wanted, namely, a ''Thus saith my 
father." 

A. But that was only on a business matter. To 
learn business, a man must use his own head, not 
some other person's. But, for the infinite concerns 
of the immortal soul, a " Thus saith the Lord " is 
needed ; not a '' Thus saith President Harper, or 
Professor Briggs, or these new departure preach- 
ers that are getting into the pulpits nowadays." 

B. Do you mean to say that, in order to train 
your son for business life, finer methods are needed 
than to train him and you and me for our being 
about our Father's business forever? 

A. That is how you play with words. There 
is no logic in theology nowadays, no major prem- 
ise, minor premise, nor conclusion. I have been 
wasting your time and mine, too, in so long a 
talk. Here comes Mr. C. He is one of your 
kind. I don't mean you any harm, remember. 
Good-day. 



Some Plain Questioning. 221 

B. I had rather you would harm me than harm 
my influence. But God will take care of that. 
Good-day, and may he be with and bless you ! 



II. 

C. Good-morning. 

B. Good-morning. 

C. I am so glad I have found you. I take the 
train to-night for my little mission among the 
mountains. We shall not have a chance to do 
church work together again, perhaps ever, nor 
shall we meet for a long time. I want to ask you 
some questions. Put the answers in pat. 

B, I have not much wisdom. Let us have the 
questions. I will do the best I can with them. 

C. Is there, to begin with, any truth in the 
sneering remark that the newer religious thinking 
** is a theology without a theologian"? 

B. We have the same state of things in that 
matter which always ensues when general work, 
which has probably inclined to a priori^ yields 
place to induction, with detailed work. The latter 
sets everybody a task. There are fifty or five 
hundred scientists, or theologians, where there used 
to be five. They subdivide the subject. Each toils 
in his own field. There is, thus, not the chance 
for individual prominence which there once was. 



222 Appendix C 



The popular imagination, therefore, is not so much 
appealed to, and the remark you quote is readily 
caught up. " Make us a king to judge us," the 
popular imagination is always demanding, no longer 
of Samuel, but of theology. But the remark is 
very superficial. It would imply, in principle, 
that natural history in America is going backward 
because no man among us has succeeded to the 
precise eminence of Agassiz. Agassiz, on the con- 
trary, strove to pass the blessing on to thousands. 
This was the meaning of his summer schools. It 
is inconceivable that he could make such a re- 
mark of the newer science, were he still with us, 
as this about the newer religious thinking. 

C. What you say leads to my second question : 
Is our instruction in theology up to the necessi- 
ties of the hour? 

B. On the whole it is doing well, — in some 
of our institutions very well. There does not 
always go with the necessary subdivision of work 
so much of a unifying spirit as there should. 
There is lack, sometimes, of a temper, in this 
respect, like Agassiz's in natural history, or Mark 
Hopkins's in ethics. Neither has theology proper, 
as it seems to me, enough broken with the old 
topical divisions, subdivisions, etc. The Linnaean 
classification in Botany had its uses, but was 
obliged to yield to a better. Courage and con- 



Some Plain Questioning' 223 

structive genius are needed in this respect. All 
things considered, however, — for we must not 
forget that we are in a change of outlook almost 
revolutionary, and that the conditions of work are 
therefore difficult, — the situation is gratifying, 
though there are some things yet to be desired. 

C. I am glad to hear you say so. Is there not, 
however, danger that the newer approach to truth 
will constitute yet another dogmatism? 

B. Certainly. In individuals it surely will. 
Few men have the calibre and heart to remain 
always teachable and learning. Against this peril 
in ourselves let us both strive. But I think, under 
the inductive spirit, dogmatism can never again 
reign. When I spoke of "■ constructive genius," I 
did not mean constructive of dogmatic systems. 
Their day has passed. 

C. Bless God, if it shall prove so ! I think I 
have heard you say that there is an advantage 
for the Old Testament in the new view of it? 

B. A very great advantage. Before, its uses 
were fragmentary. Certain passages, certain 
phrases, and here and there a portion of it, were 
specially comforting or helpful, but, as a whole, 
particularly in the prophets, it was a sort of terra 
incognrta, however well traversed by the reader. 
Everything in it, on the contrary, now leaps into 
meaning. The life within it speaks. We see it 



2 24 Appendix C, 



growing, advancing, struggling in the process, but 
victorious. Some one has Hkened this to the 
difference between knowing the perorations of 
Burke or Webster, and knowing the men them- 
selves and the national crises through which they 
passed. 

C. That is what I so much like about the new 
idea of the Bible. God's living Spirit and men's 
spirits are brought to the front. There is a voice 
now as truly as to Moses or Isaiah. For this the 
Bible is finger-board, indicates directions, suggests, 
stirs the heart. It is an indispensable auxiliary. 
Breathing with intense life, it is a kind of Mar- 
seillaise Hymn to which the soul marches. But it 
is no longer put forward as if it were itself life. 
It does not bind thought and truth fast forever. 
Individual men, the human race, and the heav- 
enly life, are left their chance to expand evermore. 
The crustacean stage is over. 

B, You catch the thought. 

C. I am so thankful that you magnify Christ. I 
have two perplexities there, however. One of 
them is practical. How can so broad a Christian 
union as you yearn for come' while some whom 
you would include in it believe Christ to be far 
less than most who are to be included in it believe 
him to be? 

B. Saint John had that difficulty. It was he 



Some Plain Questioning. 225 

who spoke where we read : " Master, we saw one 
casting out devils in thy name; and we forbade 
him, because he foUoweth not with us. But Jesus 
said unto him. Forbid him not : for he that is not 
against you is for you." Our Lord seems also to 
have had in view and been hospitable toward the 
two types of mental outlook when he said, " Be- 
lieve me that I am in the Father, and the Father 
in me : or else believe me for the very works* 
sake." There exist necessarily these two types. 
Their existence should be a perpetual caution to 
us not to be too certain that we have compassed 
this great subject. But, in any case, the irrepres- 
sible yearning of Christendom in our time to be 
one is a voice of God, if ever God spoke in the 
soul of an age. 

C. So it seems to me, though there are complex- 
ities about the problem. But, again, you speak of 
the infinite Christ principle, the Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world. Is this concept 
enough? 

B. No. No concept is enough. There are as 
many sides of Christ as there are of this round 
globe. We must be open and alert for all of them. 
But this concept is primary. It will last us a good 
while. • The skipper's boy, you remember, having 
been told to steer the sloop by a certain star, woke 
him up after a little, saying, " Father, give me 

15 



226 Appendix C. 



another star, I Ve got past that one." We shall 
not soon get past this. 

C. Indeed we shall not. Do you not think, to 
touch on another subject, that there is a practical 
peril about what is called the " larger hope "? 

B. Yes. And there was practical peril about 
the old eschatology. It was the wrecking of many 
a man's faith. It hardened men. The " larger 
hope " has, no one should forget, a sense, almost 
awful, of the evil of sin and of its sure punishment 
in any event. With this, on the other hand, it 
couples thoughts of God worthier, as it believes, 
than those of the other view. 

C. I think that a fair way to put it. Only one 
question more. Does the newer thinking make as 
good Christians? 

B. How good Christians? 

C. As good as the old made. 

B. How good did the old make? 

C. Well, I admit that it did not always make 
good ones ; it made, for instance, Judas, and Car- 
dinal Wolsey, and — well, me. 

B. Have you not known Christians holding 
obvious errors who were shining Christians, 
nevertheless? 

C. Yes. 

B. And Christians holding ideal views who, not- 
withstanding, belied the name of Christ? 



Some Plain Questiojiing. 227 

C. Yes. 

B. While we recognize, then, that a transitional 
period in thought, like that in which we now are, 
must affect temporarily some Christian life for the 
better and some for the worse, shall we not say, 
nevertheless, that it is not the thinking that makes 
the Christian, but the following Christ that makes 
him? 

C. That is it. 

B. And you and I will do it? 

C. God helping us, we will. Good-by. 

B. Good-by, and may God bless the little mis- 
sion among the mountains ! 



In how many and what uncertain words do men strive 
to express the simplest truth when that truth is 07ily dawn- 
ing on themselves and on others / // is like the shrilly 
disordered jargoning of birds when morning first flushes 
the east. Presently the whole firmament glows, the sun is 
up, the mists flee away, jargon is do?te, and day reigns. 



LIST OF PRINCIPAL NOTES. 

Page 

Concerning these Discourses 13, 161, 198 

Had Christ Mental Advance during his Ministry? . . 15 

Mr. Bullard and Dr. Bushnell 17 

Professor Tucker's " From Liberty to Unity " . . . . 27 

Dr. Sheldon (and see text) 32 

Channing, Parker, Emerson, Carlyle 43 

" Plain Words on our Lord's Work " 53 

Capital and Labor 92 

Restoring the Order of I sraelitish History 150 

Professor Thayer and Dr. Gladden on the Bible . . . 152 

Dr. Edgerly (and see text) 166 

How Camelot looked as men approached it . . . . 170 

Disfellowshipping Drs. Hale, Peabody, and Others . . 178 

Death the Enhancing of Phillips Brooks's Influence . 180 

Heresy of the Antithesis between Nature and God . . 188 

" Ye cannot bear them now " 198 

The Resurrection Dialogue 212 

With the Saviour it was all vision 215 



/ saw a new heaven a?id a new earth, 
I saw no temple therein. 
His servants shall serve him. 
They shall see his face. 
His name shall be in their foreheads. 
There shall be no night there. 
I Johii saw these things^ and heard them. 
Love is of God. 
Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 

Saint John. 



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